A fast MBAFF mode prediction strategy for H.264-AVC

As a new technique, MBAFF is added to H.264/AVC to achieve higher compression efficiency for interlaced video materials. However, at the same time the complexity increases largely because of the triple-pass nature of the algorithm. Therefore, reducing the coding complexity by detecting the encoding mode of each MB is necessary. A novel fast MBAFF mode prediction strategy is proposed in this paper, it gives out a promising estimation of the encoding mode for each MB and it requires only one pass of the data. Experiment results prove that the proposed algorithm significantly reduces the computation of coding, while preserving video quality to an acceptable level.