A flexible reference picture management scheme

Reference picture management is an important part in video encoding and decoding process, and has great influence on the coding performance. In this paper, a flexible reference picture management scheme is proposed for the second generation of Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS2). In the proposed scheme, reference configuration set (RCS), which consists of reference picture information, is used to manage the reference picture. Based on RCS, the reference picture set for current coding picture can be arbitrarily configured. Experimental results show that the proposed flexible reference picture management scheme achieves significant bitrate reduction in AVS2 encoder. For low delay P and random access common test condition, the average coding gain can be up to 4.3% and 5.1% respectively.