Improved Inter Prediction based on Structural Similarity in H.264

H.264 achieves higher compression efficiency by employing multiple modes inter prediction, rate-distortion (RD) optimal mechanism and other new techniques. Distortion metric plays an important role in video compression performance. Structural similarity (SSIM) is a new image quality assessment method, which is more consistent with Human Vision Systems (HVS). So in this paper, we propose to adopt SSIM as the distortion metric in the inter prediction cost functions, named "improved inter prediction method based on SSIM" (IPBSS). It is an improved method of our previous work MEBSS. Simulation results indicate that the IPBSS can averagely save bit rate more than 13% while maintaining the almost same video quality with QP = 10, 20 and 30. That is a better result than our previous work MEBSS.