Visual saliency guided mode decision in video compression based on Laplace distribution of DCT coefficients

A visual saliency based approach for macroblock (MB) mode selection in video compression is presented. It is based on the Laplace distribution of transformed residuals. Visual saliency of a MB is used to make the encoder vote for a mode which requires less bits in a region which is visually less important. It shows a gain of up to 0.6 dB in terms of PSNR compared to conventional rate-distortion optimization (RDO) procedure in H.264/AVC. Moreover, it suggests to be a competitive alternative to a well-established perceptually based video coding method. At the same time it has no negative impact on the PSNR.