A two level mode decision algorithm for H.264 high profile intra encoding

A two level mode decision algorithm considering edge information for H.264 high profile intra encoding is proposed to reduce the computational complexity. In level one mode decision, the edge information is used to decide the appropriate intra coding block size according to the observations that a smooth macroblock usually chooses the large intra coding block size, and that a complex macroblock usually chooses the small one. In level two mode decision, we use the correlation between adjacent blocks to decide the appropriate prediction modes. The proposed method achieves 34%~59% reduction of computational complexity when compared to JM14 and the PSNR only drops 0.09 db in average.