Fast mode decision for error resilient video coding

The error resilience and low-complexity video encoding are two major requirements of real-time visual communications on mobile devices. To address the two requirements simultaneously, this paper presents a fast mode decision algorithm for the error resilient video coding in packet loss environment. The proposed algorithm is a two-step method: early skip mode decision and early intra mode decision. Different from the existing methods for early skip mode decision, the proposed method takes the error-propagation distortion into account in estimating the coding cost. Considering the intra blocks are frequently used to terminate the error propagations, we also propose a method to fast estimate the intra block coding cost, so that the intra mode can be early determined. Overall, the proposed method can significantly reduce the encoding time while keeping the coding efficiency similar to the rate-distortion optimized mode decision method.