Early Direct Mode Decision for a Hardware-Based H.264/AVC Encoder
ICEIC : International Conference on Electronics, Informations and Communications · 2010
The H.264/AVC video coding standard achieves considerably higher compression efficiency than previous standards due to several new features. Especially in main/high profile, B slices can support multidirectional predictions including the support of the direct mode. The direct mode plays an important role not only in bit rate reduction but also in speed up for B slices. In this paper, a novel early direct mode decision is proposed. The proposed scheme is regular, simple and easy to implement in a hardware-based H.264/AVC encoder. Experimental results show that an average of 62% of time saving is achieved with a negligible degradation of compression efficiency.