On Overriding H.264/AVC B−Slice Predicted Residue Coding

The use of motion compensation (both forward and bidirectional) allied with transform−quantisation based coding of the residual predicted error has been ubiquitous in video coding standards. The most recent standard, H.264/AVC, maintains this paradigm, introducing even more efficient tools to determine and compress predicted residue information. In this paper we investigate the effects of eliminating the encoding of bidirectional prediction residue in H.264/AVC. Extensive experimental tests show gains of up to 50% of the bit rate for the same PSNR value, for B slices. An analysis of this procedure also reveals an interesting relation between H.264/AVC motion estimation and dictionary−based methods, namely vector quantisation and Lempel−Ziv encoders.