Fast Coding Mode Selection for Rate-Distortion Optimization in H.264/AVC

In current H.264/AVC encoder, the optimal coding mode of given macroblock (MB) is obtained by searching all possible modes and compared with the rate distortion (R-D) cost, called R-D optimization (RDO). The RDO operation requires the huge computational power. For fast RDO, we proposed two methods: adaptive intra-mode selection and early SKIP prediction. Experimental results show that these two methods can significantly reduce encoding time by about 23.5% and 14.5%, separately, and 31.8% by merging two methods with only negligible coding performance degradation.