A Fast Multiple Reference Frame Selection Algorithm Based on H.264/AVC

AbstrcatA reference frame selection algorithm was proposed to fastly determine the reference frames required by the current macroblock, which can avoid redundant reference frames. This algorithm can utilize the texture characteristic of sequence to estimate the possible number of reference frames, and further determine the best reference frame of 16×16, 8×8 and 4×4 modes according to the motion information and the monotony of RDO among different reference frames. So the likely reference frames of other modes may be adaptively chosen according to the correlation of reference frame selection with the above modes. The results showed that it can save about 30% of encoding time while maintaining nearly unchanged PSNR and bit-rate.