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DONG-WEI LIN, JIN-LONG HSIEH, SHIH-HSUAN YANG
AND CHIA-CHI YANG
Department of Computer Science and Information Engineering
National Taipei University of Technology
Taipei, 106 Taiwan
Provision of variable block sizes and multiple reference frames in motion estimation
(ME) significantly improves the compression efficiency of H.264. The involved
computation for finding the best reference picture and ME mode in the rate-distortion
minimization sense, however, is usually intimidating. In this paper, a new H.264 fast inter-
mode decision algorithm is presented. The proposed method employs the coded
block patterns, correlated modes and rate-distortion costs to avoid exhaustive mode
evaluation. Specific values of coded block patterns, which reflect the accuracy of 16x16 ME, are used to identify whether large partitioning blocks are suitable. Inter-frame
correlation in terms of modes and rate-distortion costs, is further incorporated for fast
mode decision. Accuracy of the proposed expediting criteria is verified through comprehensive
evaluations. Compared with state-of-the-art fast mode-decision algorithms,
the proposed method achieves consistently more time savings with little sacrifice in bit
rate. In addition to the reduction in computational complexity, the proposed method is
elegant without any ad-hoc thresholds.
Received March 10, 2010; revised May 28, 2010; accepted August 9, 2010.
Communicated by Chung-Lin Huang.
* This work was supported in part by the National Science Council, Taiwan, under the Grant No. NSC 98-2220-
E-027-002 and NSC 100-2219-E-027-002.