Fast mode selection based on texture analysis and local motion activity in H.264/JVT

The H.264/JVT video coding standard can achieve considerably higher coding efficiency than previous standards. Unfortunately, this comes at the cost of greatly increased complexity at the encoder, mainly due to multi-reference frames and multi-block type motion estimation. In order to speed up the process of multi-block type motion estimation, a method is proposed to eliminate some redundant coding modes which contribute very little coding gain; it is based on texture analysis and local motion activity. Simulation results show that the proposed method can eliminate about half of all coding modes while keeping similar coding efficiency, visual quality and bitrates. Furthermore, this method can be used with any fast motion estimation algorithm.