Adaptive Detachable Partition-Based Reference Frame Recompression for Video Coding

To reduce the huge off-chip dynamic random-access memory bandwidth which occupies a significant portion of the system power, reference frame recompression (RFRC) becomes one of the most vital components in the application-specified integrated circuit implementation of video codecs. RFRC challenges to increase the compression ratio with low-complexity and support random access of the compressed data. This article presents an adaptive detachable partition-based RFRC scheme which is capable of compressing a variable-size to a fixed bit of access unit. Compared with the conventional schemes which compress fixed-size partition to variable bits, this work can increase the compression ratio by greatly reducing the redundancy of the partitions’ boundaries. Moreover, a high-speed coding algorithm is applied to reduce the complexity and increase the parallelism of compressing and decompressing. Finally, a new memory mapping strategy is utilized to support random access. As a result, the reference frame can be compressed by 68% with no quality degradation.