Encoder-unconstrained user interactive partial decoding scheme

High-definition (HD) videos become more and more popular on portable devices these years. Due to the resolution mismatch between the HD video sources and the relative low-resolution screens of portable devices, the HD videos are usually fully decoded and then downsampled (FDDS) for the displays, which not only increase the cost of both computational power and memory bandwidth, but also lose the details of video contents. In this paper, an encoder-unconstrained partial decoding scheme for H.264/AVC is presented to solve the problem by only decoding the object of interest (OOI) related region, which is defined by users. A simplified compression domain tracking method is utilized to ensure that the OOI locates in the center of the display area. The decoded partial area (DPA) adaptation, the reference block relocation (RBR) and colocated temporal Intra prediction (CTIP) methods are proposed to improve the visual quality for the DPA with low complexity. The simulation results show that the proposed partial decoding scheme provides an average of 50.16% decoding time reduction comparing to the fully decoding process. The displayed region also presents the original HD granularity of OOI. The proposed partial decoding scheme is especially useful for displaying HD video on the devices of which the battery life is a crucial factor.