A fast inter-mode decision scheme based on luminance difference for H.264/AVC

In this paper, we propose a fast inter-mode decision scheme based on luminance difference for the state-of-the-art video coding standard H.264/AVC. The potential modes set of mode decision process is divided into three sub-sets, one of the three sub-sets is selected according to macroblock (MB) motion activity which is measured by the luminance difference between current MB and its collocated MB in previous frame. The experimental results show that, when compared to the full mode decision scheme in H.264/AVC reference software, the proposed scheme can reduce the total encoding time about 36.74% with 0.04dB PSNR loss and 5.44% Bitrate increase, on average.