A novel energy reduction technique for H.264 intra mode decision

In this paper, we propose a novel energy reduction technique for H.264 intra mode decision. The proposed technique reduces the number of additions performed by Sum of Absolute Transformed Difference based 4×4, 16×16 and 8×8 intra mode decision algorithms used in H.264 joint model reference software encoder by 46%, 43% and 42% respectively for a CIF size frame without any PSNR loss. We also implemented an efficient H.264 16×16 intra mode decision hardware including the proposed technique using Verilog HDL. The proposed technique reduced the energy consumption of this H.264 16×16 intra mode decision hardware up to 59.6%.