Video coding using compressed reference frames

Handheld battery-operated consumer electronics video devices such as camera phones, digital still cameras, digital camcorders, and personal media players have limited system memory bandwidth available because of cost and power consumption constraints. Video coding consumes a significant amount of this limited system memory bandwidth especially at high-definition (HD) resolution. Techniques that reduce memory bandwidth in video coding are crucial for implementing video coding at HD resolutions in portable video devices. Memory bandwidth reduction is also desirable from a power consumption point of view since memory accesses consume a significant amount of power. In this paper we present our technique - in-loop compression of reference frames - for reducing memory bandwidth in video coding.