Joint rate-distortion optimization for H.264/AVC intra coding based on cluster computing

This paper presents a joint rate-distortion optimization coding scheme for H.264/AVC intra coding, which uses cluster computing technologies to jointly optimize coding parameters among different image blocks. We identify two kinds of dependencies, inter sub-block dependency and inter macroblock dependency, ignored in the ordinary rate-distortion optimization and a joint RD cost is designed in the optimization process to consider those dependencies. We show that with our proposed scheme, a significant better coding performance can be achieved with the standard-compliant bitstreams. Experiment results show up to 5% bits saving compared to the H.264/AVC reference software.