Survey and Pareto Analysis Method for Coding Efficiency Assessment of Low Complexity H.264 Algorithms

A large number of algorithms have been proposed by researchers to reduce H.264computational complexity. Currently there is no method for reliably comparing theeffectiveness of these algorithms. This paper proposes a method that allows direct comparison of the results obtained for various previously published low complexity H.264 encoding algorithms. The method is based on a new coding efficiency metric for unified bit rate and quality assessment. Pareto analysis is used to derive an optimal reference efficiency complexity curve using standard H.264 encoding tools and parameters. The paper demonstrates application of the method to the assessment of recently published low-complexity algorithms. The method shows that some published low complexity algorithms can be outperformed by simply adjusting the standard video encoder parameters.