Fast mode decision algorithm in H.264 for video communications

The H.264/MPEG-4 AVC is the video coding standard which achieves higher coding efficiency than previous standards such as H.263 or MPEG2. The improvement in the rate-distortion performance in H.264 is mainly due to the accurate motion estimation with multiple block sizes and multiple reference frames. However, this performance gain comes at the cost of a greatly increased computational complexity. In this paper, a fast mode decision algorithm is proposed for H.264 video coding, which can enables the H.264 encoder to be effectively adopted for video communications and mobile implementations. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can efficiently reduce the computational cost by 80% with similar visual quality and bit rate.