Predictive Mode Selection of Adaptive Transform Coding with Rate-Distortion Optimization for MPEG-4 Part-10 AVC/H.264

Abstract

Moving Picture Experts Group-4 part-10 advanced video coding/H.264 standard uses rate-distortion optimization (RDO) as a measure to achieve a more satisfactory trade-off between bitrate and image quality. Adaptive transform coding (ATC) can further provide superior RDO results (RDO costs) to those of fixed transform block-size coding. This paper presents a predictive method to skip 4 x 4 block transform coding to reduce the computational cost when it determines a minimal RDO cost of motion estimation and ATC. The experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the computation by approximately 4.39%-48.51% with -0.003561-dB display distortion and 1.08% bitrate increment.