An adaptive fast multiple reference frames selection algorithm for H.264/AVC

To make full use of the temporal correlation of video sequences, H.264/AVC adopts multiple reference frames to enhance the coding quality. While the performance being improved, the complexity of computation has been increased linearly, too. In this paper, we study motion characteristic of video sequences and spatial correlation in video frames first, and then we propose an adaptive fast multiple reference frames selection algorithm. It can decrease the number of reference frames for motion compensation, and reduce the complexity of coding adaptively according to the features of video sequences. The results show that our algorithm achieves 45% coding time saving on average with unnoticeable quality loss.