A Survey of Fast Inter Mode Decision Algorithms for H.264/AVC Video Encoding System

Abstract

The MPEG-4 Part-10 AVC/H.264 standard employs several powerful coding methods to obtain high compression efficiency. To reduce the temporal and spatial redundancy more effectively, motion compensation uses variable block sizes and directional inter prediction investigates all available coding modes to decide the best one. But when we perform all of variable block sizes, it means very high complexity due to the large number of combinations of coding modes. Thus the decision process requires extremely high computational load. The goal of this study is to review the fast mode decision methods and classify them into different categories. In this survey, we explain the methods in terms of how to determine decision of Macroblock (MB) to reduce its complexity and compare the performance of the well-known algorithms in terms of quality, bitrate and speed of encoding system. We verify several proposed algorithms to achieve speed up factor of with minimal loss image quality and negligible bitrate increment.