A feature-based approach to fast H.264 intra/inter mode decision

A feature-based fast intra/inter mode decision method is proposed to reduce the encoder complexity of the H.264 video coding standard in this work. The main idea is to decide the mode using the expected risk of choosing the wrong mode in a multidimensional feature space. The proposed algorithm calculates three features and maps them into the one of three regions; namely, risk-free, risk-tolerable, and risk-intolerable regions. Depending on the mapped region, we can apply algorithms of different complexities for the final mode decision. It is demonstrated by experimental results that the proposed algorithm can save approximately 20-32% of the total encoding time of H.264 (JM7.3a) with little degradation in the rate-distortion performance.