Fast mode decision and reduction of reference frames for H.264 encoder

In order to reduce the heavy computation burden of H.264 encoder, a fast and effective algorithm for mode decision and reduction of reference frames is presented. The proposed algorithm uses the property of inactive regions to effectively skip unnecessary modes and reference frames. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves a reduction of 42% encoding time on average, with a negligible average PSNR loss of 0.08 dB and 0.52% bit-rate increase.