Efficient Reference Frame Selection Method for Lightweight HEVC Encoder

As a demand of video resolution increases highly, video encoder can face difficulties on the computational complexity to process huge pixel data with real-time environment. Many researches have focused on the complexity of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) test model (i.e., HM) which is far from real-time encoding for even high-definition video. However, it has been rarely studied in literature to establish a lightweight HEVC test model (LHM) and to decrease the complexity of LHM further. In this paper, LHM that equips fast encoding options is newly established, and a fast motion estimation (ME) method is proposed to challenge decreasing the encoding complexity of LHM. The proposed method exploits the intriguing correlation of the motion information of merge/skip mode with the information of other motion partitions to minimize the required number of reference frames in ME process. Experimental results showed that the proposed method could substantially decrease the complexity of LHM in view of encoding time as well as memory access.