Motion Adaptive Intra Refresh for Low Delay HEVC Encoding

Abstract

Low delay video coding is a critical technology for real-time applications. The method of periodic intra refresh (PIR) can obtain the low delay effect by embedding the intra-coding columns or slices into inter frames (e.g. P or B frames). However, due to the diversity of video motion direction, this method still cannot achieve the optimal coding performance. In this paper, we propose a motion adaptive intra refresh method, which can choose the optimal refresh direction adaptively according to the video motion direction. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can achieve 2.2% and 2.5% BD-rate gain in average compared with the periodic intra refresh method for PSNR and SSIM, respectively, with a similar low delay effect under the low delay P configuration in HM16.14. At the same time, the encoding time ratio is 99.85%, which means the time complexity of the two algorithms remains at the same level.