An efficient and fast mode decision method for inter slice of H.264/AVC

The H.264/AVC video coding standard can achieve higher coding efficiency than the existing video coding standards. In order to improve the coding performance, the encoder employs the rate-distortion (RD) optimization technique to select an optimum mode for each macroblock. Since it finds the mode having the minimum RD cost among seven possible modes, it requires exhaustive computations. In this paper, we introduce an efficient and fast mode decision method to reduce computational complexity. Experimental results show that the proposed method extremely reduces encoding time with only negligible coding loss.