Bit Rate Estimation for Cost Function of 4Ã\x974 Intra Mode Decision of H.264/AVC

H.264/AVC is a newest international video coding standard that can achieve considerably higher coding efficiency than previous standards. This comes at the cost of the complex mode decision procedure using the rate-distortion optimization, which makes real-time encoding difficult. To reduce the complexity of rate-distortion cost, we propose a bit rate estimation technique to avoid the entropy coding method during mode decision of intra prediction. The estimation method is based on the properties of context-based variable length coding (CAVLC). Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed estimation method achieves up to 53 % reduced encoding time of intra coding with ignorable degradation of coding performance.