Model-based early termination scheme for H.264/AVC inter prediction

Inter prediction is the most power-consumed component in H.264/AVC encoder. For the power-aware design, it is necessary to reduce the power consumption by using fast inter prediction techniques. In this paper, a system-level power-aware algorithm based on the early termination scheme of H.264/AVC inter prediction is proposed. The proposed early termination scheme for H.264 motion estimation is based on the statistical modeling of the motion compensated residual data. We develop a power-aware adaptive mechanism with multiple thresholds derived from the statistical model to early terminate the motion estimation (ME). According to the experimental results, our early termination scheme for H.264/AVC inter prediction not only preserves fine RD performance but also eliminates the unnecessary operation in both IME stage and FME stage to realize the power-aware H.264 encoder system.