Complexity control of HEVC based on region-of-interest attention model

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel complexity control method of HEVC to adjust its encoding complexity. First, a region-of-interest (ROI) attention model is established, which defines different weights for various regions according to their importance. Then, the complexity control algorithm is proposed with a distortion-complexity optimization model, to determine the maximum depth of the largest coding units (LCUs) according to their weights. We can reduce the encoding complexity to a given target level at the cost of little distortion loss. Finally, the experimental results show that the encoding complexity can drop to a pre-defined target complexity as low as 20% with bias less than 7%. Meanwhile, our method is verified to preserve the quality of ROI better than another state-of-the-art approach.