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H.264 / Advanced Video Coding (AVC)
Overview
ITU-T H.264, or AVC video coding, is fast replacing the earlier video standards in the end-to-end chain of video content delivery, personal entertainment, video surveillance and visual communications.
Ittiam AVC
Ittiam has developed a rich portfolio of intellectual property (IP) around the H.264 standard over the past years. This IP includes highly differentiated algorithms in the areas of motion estimation, mode selection, rate control, transcoding, low latency solutions, and error resilience / error propagation control. These IPs are embodied in Ittiam's Reference C model which forms the basis of implementations of H.264 on various platforms.
These IPs for H.264 and other video coding standards, along with additional platform-specific IPs such as multi-threaded designs, multi-core architectures, and optimizations have resulted in efficient codecs realized on multiple programmable platforms (e.g. TI processors such as OMAP3, DM6467) and cores (such as ARM Cortex A8 / A9). These codecs have been licensed to several customers in the areas of entertainment devices (personal, in-flight, in-car), video conferencing equipments, surveillance netcams / DVRs, and transcoding devices.
AVC Encoder
AVC Decoder
Benefits
Applications
- I, P slices
- Intra 16x16 and Intra4x4 - support for all modes
- Constrained intra prediction option
- Motion partitions down to 8x8 (16x16, 16x8, 8x16, 8x8)
- Unrestricted motion compensation
- Second reference support
- Quarter pixel accurate motion vectors
- In-loop Deblocking (ability to turn on / off)
- CAVLC
- Optional BP + CABAC encoding
- Fast motion estimation:
- Reduced complexity motion estimation algorithm that performs close to full search
- Search with 16x16, 16x8, 8x16, 8x8 modes at reduced complexity
- Option to reduce number of sub-pixel refinement points without significant loss in quality
- Rate constrained motion estimation
- Mode Selection:
- Transform domain RD optimal mode selection between I16x16 and I4x4 modes for Intra slices
- Reduced complexity schemes for I4x4 mode evaluation in P-slices
- Rate and distortion based Intra vs. Inter mode selection
- Optional Rate-Distortion optimal mode selection across Inter or Intra vs. Skip mode for good quality at low bit-rates
- Rate control:
- Low latency, CBR, frame skipping to maintain low latency
- VBR rate control – buffer management without underflow / overflow
- Perceptually adaptive bit allocation
- Algorithms tuned for conferencing application:
- Low latency scalability
- Slice based encoding for error resilience and packet utilization
- Exploit region of interest to decrease bit-rate and reduce complexity at the same time
- Patent pending Distortion Based Refresh (DBR) for low latency drift control
- Configurable / Auto Refresh Rate settings for maximizing video quality and QoS
Apart from providing regular standard complaint, highly optimized H264 Baseline Profile, Main profile and High Profile decoders for portable Infotainment, Mobile, IPTV and Headend broadcast reception, Itttiam specializes in offering error resilient decoder tuned for Video Phone applications.
- Can decode a redundant slice if primary slice is lost
- Missing slice concealment
- Optional slice group type 1 based spatial / temporal concealment
- RFC 2733 compliant Forward Error Correction (FEC)
- FEC for Unequal Error Protection
- Validated set of encoder algorithms that result in a high quality video
- Address low-latency, packet-loss resilient encoding
- Unique set of features that are highly relevant for conferencing-grade and surveillance grade encoding
- Reduced complexity algorithms suitable for platform porting
- Complexity can be trade off against quality quickly for a given platform
- Reduced time to port to an embedded platform
- Easy to partition across multiple cores
- Maintaining comparable quality against JM reference encoder
- Lower memory footprint, lower cycle count, and reduced external memory bandwidth when ported to a programmable platform
- Flexible and extensible API
- Portable Infotainment
- Mobile broadcasting
- Head end servers and High quality Video Broadcasting
- Video Conferencing
- IP network camera and / or Surveillance DVR
- Home media server
- Streaming from web hosted content
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