Direct macroblock coding for predictive (P) pictures in the H.264 standard

In this paper we introduce a new Inter Macroblock type within the H.264 (or MPEG-4 AVC) video coding standard that can further improve coding efficiency by exploiting the temporal correlation of motion within a sequence. This leads to a reduction in the bits required for encoding motion information, while retaining or even improving quality under a Rate Distortion Optimization Framework. An extension of this concept within the skip macroblock type of the same standard is also presented. Simulation results show that the proposed semantic changes can lead to up to 7.6% average bitrate reduction or equivalently 0.39dB quality improvement over the current H.264 standard.