A Fast Block Type Decision Method for H.264/AVC Intra Prediction

Compared to the other existing video coding standards, the H.264/AVC video coding standard improves the compression performance significantly attributed to some efficient techniques such as the rate-distortion optimization (RDO). For this robust technique is quite time-consuming, many methods have been proposed to reduce the RDO computation cost. In this paper, we propose a fast method to decide the block type for intra prediction so that much RDO computation can be saved. In the method, two primary amplitude thresholds and SATD of the 16×16 luma block are defined to judge the intra 4×4 and intra 16×16 block. Experiments show that it can save 6%~22% coding time for all intra frame sequence with PSNR loss less than 0.02db and bits increase less than 0.1%. When combined with other algorithm, the method still works well.