Efficient coding strategy for HEVC performance improvement by exploiting motion features

The striking feature of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) Standard is emphasized by 50% bit-rate reduction compared to its predecessor H.264/AVC while keeping the same perceptual image quality. The time complexity - a congenital issue of HEVC has also increased to intensify the compression ratio. However, it is really a demanding task for the researchers to reduce the encoding time while preserving expected quality of the video sequences. Our contribution is to trim down the computational time by efficient selection of appropriate block-partitioning modes in HEVC using motion features based on phase-correlation. In this paper, we use phase-correlation between current and reference blocks to extract three motion features and combine them to determine binary motion pattern of the current block. The motion pattern is then matched against a codebook of predefined pattern templates to determine a subset of the inter-modes. Only the selected modes are exhaustively motion estimated and compensated for a coding unit. The experimental outcomes demonstrate that the average computational time can be down scaled by 30% of the HEVC while providing improved rate-distortion performance.