Abstract: Digital image acquisition device such as CCD/CMOS sensors often introduces random temporal noise into digital video sequences. Temporal noise generally carries high frequency components in both the spatial and temporal domains and is also random in nature. Because of these properties, they are generally very expensive to encode and would substantially degrade coding efficiency. It is therefore important to eliminate or suppress such temporal noise in video inputs prior to encoding. The present invention provides a methodology to achieve such a goal in a highly cost-effective manner where coding performance, latency, computational cost, and memory requirements are optimized. This methodology can be efficiently implemented as part of digital video compression algorithm and scales nicely for various bitrates.

Abstract: A method for selecting a picture prediction mode from a candidate pool of picture prediction modes for video compression takes advantage of similarity in implementation between SKIP and DIRECT modes and one other inter-picture prediction modes, namely, the 16×16 partition mode. The SKIP/DIRECT modes are considered if and only if the final prediction information of the 16×16 partition mode, including motion vector, reference picture index, and prediction direction, is the same as that of the respective SKIP and/or DIRECT modes. The same motion prediction, reference picture index and prediction direction are used for the 16×16 partition mode and the SKIP/DIRECT modes, and therefore, the same interpolation scheme can be used for both SKIP/DIRECT and 16×16 partition modes.