Early detection of all-zero coefficients in H.264 based on DCT coefficients distribution

Based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients distribution, an effective method of early detecting all-zero discrete cosine coefficients blocks in H.264 is proposed. A mathematic model is established based on Laplacian distribution of DCT coefficients and a criterion under which each quantized coefficient becomes zero is derived. The simulation results show that compared to the Xie´s method built on Gaussian distribution, the proposed method reduces encoding time averagely without video-quality degradation for low or middle bit-rate video sequences.