A Content-based Variable-size Block Partition Method for H.264

As one of the effective coding tools in the newly-published H.264/AVC coding standard,variable-size block motion estimation is of great importance in performance evaluation of the encoder.A content-based variable-size block partition method is presented for H.264.The proposed algorithm is based on pre-analysis of video content to select between TDVSBM and BUVSBM that best suits the video in unit of the frame.To enable the adaptive selection,a method based on the STGS-image is proposed to develop an efficient and computationally simple criterion.Experimental results show that the proposed content-based variable-size block motion estimation(CBVSBM) algorithm reduces the computational complexity in contrast to both TDVSBM and BUVSBM,but with similar visual quality.