Hardware Efficient Skip Mode Detection for H.264/AVC

The paper presents a low cost skip detection algorithm and its architecture by detecting 4x4-zero block numbers in a macroblock (MB). With this simple detection mechanism and an adaptive threshold; the proposed algorithm can correctly pre-skip 82.62% of total MB encoding, and save up to 82.8% encoding time and corresponding computing power whereas maintains similar video quality because of the high accuracy prediction. Moreover, the design only occupies 0.63K gate counts so that it can be easily combined with the H.264 encoder implementation without overhead for low power and low complexity.