An SSIM-optimal H.264/AVC inter frame encoder

Rate-distortion optimization (RDO), in which distortion metric plays a vital role, has been proved to be an effective way in hybrid video coding. This paper proposes an improved rate-distortion optimization method based on SSIM (IRDO-SSIM) in RDO mode selection process. And the derivation of the proper multiplier to fit for the IRDO-SSIM is mainly described in this paper. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better rate-distortion performance, especially for image sequences with middle-motion complexity or low encoding bit-rate as comparing with H.264/AVC using conventional RDO.