Fast Coding Mode Decision for Scalable Video Coding

Recently proliferating heterogeneous video service environments should be able to deal with many different transmission speeds, image sizes, or qualities of video. However, not many existing video compression standards satisfy those necessities. To satisfy the functional requirements, the standardization of the H.264/AVC Scalable Video Coding (SVC) technique has been recently completed. It is an extension of the H.264/AVC which can encode several image sizes and qualities at the same time as a single bitstream. To perform optimum mode decision, motion estimation is performed for all MB modes, and the RD costs are compared to identify an MB mode with the smallest RD cost. This increases computational complexity of H.264/AVC SE encoding. In this paper, we propose an early skip mode detection scheme to reduce candidate modes and suggest an algorithm of fast mode decision utilizing reference modes according to the mode history.