Fast coding mode selection with rate-distortion optimization for MPEG-4 Part-10 AVC/H.264

The MPEG-4 Part-10 AVC/H.264 standard employs several powerful coding methods to obtain high compression efficiency. To reduce the temporal and spatial redundancy more effectively, motion compensation uses variable block sizes, and directional intra prediction investigates all available coding modes to decide the best one. When the rate-distortion (R-D) optimization technique is used, an encoder finds the coding mode having minimum R-D cost. Due to the large number of combinations of coding modes, the decision process requires extremely high computation. To reduce the complexity, we propose two methods: early SKIP mode decision and selective intra mode decision. In the simulation results, the proposed methods are verified to significantly reduce the entire encoding time by about 60% with only negligible coding loss.