Fast mode decision by using probabilities from arithmetic coder

This paper proposes an elaborated approach for fast mode decision by using the probabilities estimated through context models. In H.264, the binary arithmetic coder is adopted to convert encoding modes into binary bins and assign each bin a context to estimate the probability of the bin as "1" or "0". By collecting the probabilities of all bins, the probability of encoding modes can be calculated with few extra computations. The estimated probabilities can be applied to existed fast mode decision schemes to further improve the performance. It also provides probability information for scalable complexity encoding. From our experiment results, the proposed method can further improve 20% 30% encoding speed of an optimized H.264 encoder, while keeping the same coding efficiency.