Fast macroblock mode selection algorithm in H.264/AVC

Abstract

H.264/AVC provides a good coding efficiency, which coding video sequences at about half bit rate compared to MPEG-2 with same quality. One of the new techniques is implementation of different macroblock encoding mode. Originally, encoding requires search over all the possible modes for each macroblock, as to get the one with best performance. Intra and Inter prediction technique are very important for H.264 for these improvements. H.264 provides best results by using the rate-distortion optimization (RDO) to get high coding efficiency. However this coding efficiency leads to high computational complexity and is time consuming. So it is not practical for applications like real time video encoding or conference, which need fast computation. So my project aim is to develop fast algorithm in order to reduce the complexity and encoding time, meanwhile, maximize the coding rate and quality. The main technique is to improve the encoding flow, and each macroblock search among possible modes first, early termination technique is implemented to skip ‘unlikely matched modes’, and speed up the whole encoding process.