A quantized transform-domain motion estimation technique for H.264 secondary SP-frames

Abstract

The brand-new SP-frame in H.264 facilitates drift-free bitstream switching. Notwithstanding the guarantee of seamless switching, the cost is the bulky size of secondary SP-frames. This induces a significant amount of additional space or bandwidth for storage or transmission. For this reason, a new motion estimation and compensation technique, which is operated in the quantized transform (QDCT) domain, is designed for coding secondary SP-frames in this paper. So far, much investigation has been conducted to evaluate the trade off between the relative sizes of primary and secondary SP-frames by adjusting the quantization parameters. But, our proposed work aims at keeping the secondary SP-frames as small as possible without affecting the size of primary SP-frames by incorporating QDCT-domain motion estimation and compensation in the secondary SP-frame coding. Simulation results demonstrate that the size of secondary SP-frames can be reduced remarkably. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.