Optimal compression plane (OCP) — A new framework for H.264 video coding

This paper presents a framework for video coding, which is compatible with the existing H.264/AVC standard (for preprocessing). Since the video sequences are of 3D data matrices and the traditional XY image frame plane is not always the best for video coding in terms of rate-distortion (RD) performance, optimal compression plane (OCP) determination models are developed to improve the coding efficiency. We design coding plane level RD cost function (in analog to the one in H.264 macroblock level) to measure the RD performance of each coding plane. We jointly consider the available computational resource and the RD performance in order to determine an adaptive OCP. The performance of the proposed coding framework is assessed with a number video sequences. Extensive experimental results show that the new coding framework can achieve better RD performance at approximately the same computational complexity, for videos with different visual content.