EFFICIENT MODE SELECTION ALGORITHM USING IMAGE DISTORTION FOR H.264 VIDEO ENCODER

Many video compression algorithms require decisions to be made to select between different coding modes. In the case of H.264, this includes decisions about whether or not motion compensation is used, and the block size to be used for motion compensation. It has been proposed that constrained optimization techniques, such as the method of Lagrange multipliers, can be used to trade off between the quality of the compressed video and the bit rate generated. In this paper, we show that in many cases of practical interest, very similar results can be achieved with much simpler optimizations. Mode selection by simply minimizing the distortion with motion vectors and header information produces very similar results to the full constrained optimization, while it saves 31% mode selection computational time