Context-based complexity reduction applied to H.264 video compression

The Achilles' heel of video over wireless services continues to be the limited bandwidth of wireless connections and the short battery life of end-user handheld devices such as cellphones and PDAs. Efficient coding and compression techniques are required to meet the quality of service requirements of such services while effectively managing the bandwidth and power. In this thesis some strategies are proposed in order to reduce the complexity of the encoder, and are applied to H.264, the latest video compression standard. Using the knowledge of the context scenes in the video sequences, less important regions in the frames are isolated and the processing is reduced. Experimental results are presented to demonstrate the viability of the proposed strategies for minimizing the processing time of H.264 while maintaining desired quality and low bitrate. The results indicate about 50% reduction in the computational complexity of H.264.