A Fast Mode Decision Method for H.264/AVC Using the Spatial-Temporal Prediction Scheme

In the H.264/AVC coding standard, the high computation cost of the full searching in the reference software JM-9.3 makes the encoding process inefficient. In this paper, the spatial-temporal correlations between the current frame and reference frame are analyzed to develop a fast mode decision method in which no extra image processes are used. Furthermore, the concept of drift compensation is adopted to avoid the error accumulation phenomenon during the mode decision process. The experimental results show that the computation cost may be reduced above 60% and the average PSNR is only dropped about 0.04db