Efficient memory management control for H.264

Multiframe motion compensated prediction can achieve high prediction gain with additional frame buffer memory requirement. For mobile-telephony applications which utilize mobile processor and relatively small memory space, reducing the memory requirement is very important. In this paper, we propose an efficient memory management control technique, which reduces memory requirement for storing reference frames at the decoder side. Our proposed technique is a frame-based memory management scheme which discards the reference frames that are least important in terms of prediction gain performance. The optimal solution for this problem requires checking all the rate performance degradation for all the combination of discarded reference frames and therefore we propose a greedy search that checks a subset of reference frame combinations.