Fast block mode decision algorithm in H.264/AVC video coding

The recent video coding standard H.264/AVC show extremely higher coding efficiency compare to any other previous standards. H.264/AVC can achieve over 50% of bit rate saving with same quality using the rate-distortion process, but it brings high computational complexity. In this paper, we propose an algorithm that can reduce the complexity of the codec by reducing the block mode decision process adaptively. Block mode decision process in H.264/AVC consists of inter mode decision process and intra mode decision process. We deal with reduction method for inter and intra mode decision. In this paper an efficient method is proposed to reduce the inter mode decision complexity using the direct prediction methods based on block correlation and adaptive rate distortion cost threshold for early stopping. The fast intra mode reduction algorithm based on inter mode information is also proposed to reduce the computational complexity. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve up to 63.34-77.39% speed up ratio with a little PSNR loss. Increment in bit requirement is also not much noticeable. (c) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.