Fast and Efficient Intra Mode Selection for H.264/AVC

The H.264/AVC video coding standard adopts a robust rate-distortion optimization (RDO) arithmetic to select the best intra coding mode. As a result, it brings about large complexity and computational load. In this paper, a fast intra coding mode selection algorithm based on the greyscale for the H.264/AVC video coding standard is proposed. The algorithm dramatically reduces computational complexity. The experimental results verified that the proposed algorithm can save up to 26% and 60.8% of the computation time of all I frames and intra prediction coding, respectively, while still maintaining similar video quality.