An improved P_SKIP mode decision algorithm for H.264/AVC based on observers´ low sensitivity to boundary parts of video images

H.264/AVC can achieve much higher compression efficiency, compared with previous video compression standards. However, the lower encoding efficiency is an influential factor for popularization of H.264. In this paper, an improved P_SKIP mode decision algorithm for H.264 encoder is proposed: As observers are less sensitive to boundary parts of video images, a certain degree of information loss for boundary parts would not affect the feeling of observers for video images; thus, larger difference between the efficiency of P_SKIP mode and P_16×16 mode is allowed for boundary macroblocks. Experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm can achieve encoding speed-up ratio of 1.18~2.11 and bitrates reduction of 9.9% to 42.2%, the sequence with less activity can achieve higher speed-up ratio and higher bitrates reduction.