An Early Intra Mode Skipping Technique for Inter Frame Coding in H.264 BP

The latest video compression standard H.264/AVC is designed to achieve better compression efficiency compared to its predecessors such as MPEG-4 and H.263. The significant improvements in this standard are mainly due to the variable block size motion compensation and intra mode prediction process. But this improvement in compression comes with a performance tradeoff, with the motion estimation and intra mode estimation process of the H.264 baseline profile encoder accounting for the majority of the computational complexity. In this paper we propose an early intra mode skipping technique for inter frames by exploiting the temporal information present between the input frames. Computational gains in the range of 25-50% of the intra mode estimation process have been obtained from this algorithm with negligible loss in quality.