Anaylsis of motion estimation using multiple reference frames in MPEG-4AVC/H.264

In the latest video coding standard, MPEG-4 AVC /H.264, motion estimation is permitted to use multiple reference frames as opposed to the previous MPEG-4 standards that support only single reference frames[4]. This feature of H.264 improves performance but adds computational complexity. The H.264 encoder supports up to 7 inter-prediction modes: 16×16, 16×8, 8×16, 8×8, 8×4, 4×8, and 4×4. In this paper, an H.264 encoder using the 16×16 prediction mode is analyzed for both compression performance and computational complexity using multiple reference frames on various video clips.