The MPEG-4 Advanced Simple profile - a complexity study

The complexity of the newly defined visual MPEG-4 Advanced Simple (AS) profile is investigated. New tools in the AS profile include global motion compensation and quarter-pel motion compensation. Based on bitstream statistics of test sequences, the execution frequencies of decoder subtasks are derived, an opportunities for reduced-complexity implementation are explored. The results are platform-independent and can serve as basis for an MPEG-4 AS profile decoder implementation on any programmable target processor.