Fast mode decision for inter frames in H.264/AVC

The H.264/AVC video coding standard can achieve considerably higher coding efficiency than any previous standards. Unfortunately this comes from dramatically high coding complexity introduced mainly by multi-mode checking scheme when coding macroblocks. Base on statistically analyzing the best mode situations, a progressively adaptive fast mode decision algorithm is proposed in this paper to reduce the coding complexity of inter frames in H.264/AVC. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can averagely save about 75.3% coding time compared with the reference software with only about 0.15% bitrate increase and 0.15dB PSNR loss.