Fast Intra-prediction Mode Selection Method for H.264 Video Coding

Gradually widely used video coding standard H.264 has greatly improved compression efficiency, but fallen short of high calculation complexity. To simplify the algorithm that full search for intra-prediction mode in H.264 video coding, this paper proposed a fast intra-prediction mode selection method, which used the sum of absolute differences to decide the predicted block size as 16×16 or 4×4, and used the correlation of prediction direction between adjacent blocks to quickly find out optimal intra_4×4 prediction direction mode without whole modes complex RD_Costs calculation. Experimental results showed that our approach had greatly decreased the computational complexity and saved about half coding time with almost the same compression effect.