MODE decision FOR H. 264/AVC based on spatio-temporal sensitivity
Yukihiro Bandoh, Kazuya Hayase, Seishi Takamura, Kazuto Kamikura, Yoshiyuki Yashima · 2007
It is really important to use the proper prediction mode in the H.264 encoder, since it offers many more modes than the conventional methods such as MPEG-2. Typical H.264 encoders like JM and JSVM use squared error as the criterion of distortion for mode decision. However, squared error does not always provide a correct measure of the distortion from the viewpoint of subjective quality. In this paper, we investigate a mode decision method based on the human visual system in order to improve the H.264 encoder. We implement our method on reference software JSVM and compare with the original JSVM. Experiments show that our method can achieve average bit-rate savings of the order of 4.7 to 5.7% compared to the original JSVM. We confirm that both methods yield reconstructed images that basically have the same subjective image quality. Index Terms — H.264, Video coding, Subjective image quality