Complexity Estimation of the H.264 Coded Video Bitstreams

The emerging H.264 video coding standard offers a flexible coding algorithm for use in a range of applications from broadcast TV to low bitrate mobile applications. The flexibility comes with complexity. The H.264 video coding algorithm is complex and requires substantial amount of resources for encoding and decoding. The resources required to decode an H.264 video varies depending upon the encoding options used. Understanding the resources required to play the video at the receiver is especially important for mobile devices with limited amount of resources. In this paper, we present an overview of the H.264 video coding standard, complexity analysis of H.264 video, and its implications for resource management and adaptive coding for mobile devices. We examine high level bitstream characteristics and its suitability for estimating the bitstream complexity and receiver resource consumption. We show that high level metrics can be used to estimate receiver resource consumption with reasonable accuracy.