RealNetworks, Inc.
MOTION VECTOR SELECTION AND PREDICTION IN VIDEO CODING SYSTEMS AND METHODS

Abstract:

Provided herein are systems and methods for encoding an unencoded video frame of a sequence of video frames using a recursive coding block splitting schema. After a frame is divided into the maximum allowable sized regions of pixels (LCB-sized coding blocks), each LCB-sized coding block candidate ("LCBC") may be split into smaller CBCs. This process may continue recursively until the encoder determines (1) the current CBC is appropriate for encoding (e.g. because the current CBC contains only pixels of a single value) or (2) the current CBC is the minimum size for a coding block candidate for a particular implementation, e.g. 2.times.2, 4.times.4, etc., (an "MCBC"), whichever occurs first. One of two intra-prediction techniques may then be used to assign prediction values to the pixels of the coding block: a non-squared template matching technique or a directional prediction technique.