Improved FOR/SOR-based video coding and its performance analysis

The FOR/SOR algorithm was initially proposed in [1] and shown to outperform H.264/AVC by a significant margin for high definition (HD) video coding when the bit rate is equal to 20Mbps or higher. In this work, we propose an improved FOR/SOR coding scheme which offers a superior coding performance in a bit rate range of practical interest, which ranges from 1–15 Mbps. To enhance the coding performance of the proposed algorithm, we incorporate several new coding tools in the basic FOR/SOR coding algorithm in [1]. Furthermore, we attempt to give an intuitive explanation of the superior performance of the FOR/SOR coding scheme using arguments based on the R-D analysis. Finally, it is shown by experimental results that the proposed algorithm outperforms H.264/AVC significantly for HD video in the bit rate range of common interest.