Optimal Mode Decision Method for Interframe Prediction in H.264/AVC

Studies show that encoding technologies in H.264/AVC, including prediction and conversion, are essential technologies. However, these technologies are more complicated than the MPEG-4, which is a standard method and widely adopted worldwide. Therefore, the amount of calculation in H.264/AVC is significantly up-regulated compared to that of the MPEG-4. In the present study, it is intended to simplify the computational expenses in the international standard compression coding system H.264/AVC for moving images. Inter prediction refers to the most feasible compression technology, taking up to 60% of the entire encoding. In this regard, prediction error and motion vector information are proposed to simplify the computation of inter predictive coding technology. In the initial frame, motion compensation is performed in all target modes and then basic information is collected and analyzed. After the initial frame, motion compensation is performed only in the middle 8×8 modes, and the basic information amount shifts. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed method and assess the motion image compression coding, four types of motion images, defined by the international telecommunication union (ITU), are employed. Based on the obtained results, it is concluded that the developed method is capable of simplifying the calculation, while it is slightly affected by the inferior image quality and the amount of information.