A Fast Block Type Decision Method for H.264/AVC Intra Prediction

Compared to the other existing video coding standards, the H.264/AVC video coding standard improves the compression performance significantly attributed to some efficient techniques such as the rate-distortion optimization (RDO). For this robust technique is quite time-consuming, many methods have been proposed to reduce the RDO computation cost. In this paper, we propose a fast method to decide the block type for intra prediction so that much RDO computation can be saved. In the method, two primary amplitude thresholds and SATD of the 16times16 luma block are defined to judge the intra 4times4 and intra 16times16 block. Experiments show that it can save 6%~22% coding time for all intra frame sequence with PSNR loss less than 0.02 dB and bits increase less than 0.1%. When combined with other algorithm, the method still works well.