An improved early detection algorithm for all-zero blocks in H.264 video encoding

An improved algorithm for the early detection of all-zero blocks in H.264 video encoding is proposed in this paper. Based on the theoretical analyzes for the integer transform and quantization in H.264, we derive a sufficient condition under which each quantized coefficient becomes zero. And then, a more precise sufficient condition is proposed by modifying the calculation order of the sum of absolute difference obtained in the motion estimation. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves approximately an 11%-36% computational saving without video-quality degradation, compared to the conventional method.