Fast mode decision for H.264 based on correlation between macroblocks

The latest video coding standard, H.264/AVC, surpasses the former standards in performance by adopting several advanced techniques. One of the most notable improvements is flexible block types based rate distortion optimal mode decision (MD), which extremely enhances the video coding efficiency. However, the exhaustive MD involves remarkably computational complexity. Significantly increased consumption of encoding time and power leads to difficulty for actual applications. In this paper, a novel fast MD scheme is presented according the correlation between macroblocks. Sufficient experimental results show that the proposed scheme is able to reduce 44.79% encoding time averagely. The decrease of encoding performance in terms of PSNR and bitrate is acceptable.