Fast Intra/Inter Mode Decision for H.264/AVC Using the Spatial-Temporal Prediction Scheme

In the H.264/AVC coding standard, there are seven motion estimation modes from 4times4 to 16times16 are used to find the minimum motion compensation error for each macroblock in the inter frame coding. For intra prediction coding, four prediction modes are used to encode the 8 times 8 chroma and 16 times 16 luma blocks and eight prediction directions and one DC prediction are used to encode the intra 4 times 4 luma block. In this study, the spatial-temporal correlations between the current frame and the reference frame are analyzed to develop a fast mode decision method for inter/intra frame encoding in which no extra image processes are used. The experimental results show that the total computation cost can be reduced above 70%, the total bit rate just increase less than 3.7 % and the average PSNR is only dropped about 0.08 dB.