Steadiness analysis for optimal GOP size selection in HEVC

High Efficiency Video Coding is the latest and most advanced video coding standard. It supports various Group Of Pictures (GOP) sizes and types such as low delay and random access. The size of the GOP substantially influences the temporal coding process. Therefore, a suitable GOP selection strategy can have a significant impact in the compression efficiency. In this paper, a strategy for GOP selection is proposed. It is derived from a new, low complexity measure of the temporal “steadiness” in the video content. Contrasting conventional approaches the proposed technique does not relies on previous estimation of motion vectors or motion information in the video sequence. As such, it can be used for automated encoding parameter optimization at the start of the coding process. The proposed technique leads to improved encoding efficiency at a negligible computational cost, when compared with the standard coding settings. A comprehensive experimental evaluation confirm that on average -6.69%, BD-rate gain and 14.18% time savings can be achieved.