This paper presents a memory-bandwidth conscious HEVC encoding method that restricts the use of small-size inter-prediction blocks. As the number of inter-prediction blocks on sub-pixel positions increases, the memory-bandwidth associated with motion compensation process increases. When the high resolution videos such as 8K4K, 4K2K, and HDTV, are encoded and decoded, the memory bandwidth increase becomes a serious problem. The presented method prohibits the use of inter-prediction blocks which are smaller than 8x8. This restriction reduces the peak memory-bandwidth by about 60%. Simulation results for high resolution video sequences show that the restriction keeps coding efficiency loss less than about 1% and saves encoding time by 17%.
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