Algorithm and Hardware Design of a Fast Intra Frame Mode Decision Module for H.264AVC Encoders

Abstract EN

In the rate-distortion optimization (RDO), the process of choosing the best prediction mode is performed through exhaustive executions of the whole encoding process, increasing significantly the encoder computational complexity.

Considering H.264/AVC intra frame prediction, there are several modes to encode a macroblock (MB).

This work proposes an algorithm and the hardware design for a fast intra frame mode decision module for H.264/AVC encoders.

The application of the proposed algorithm reduces in more than 10 times the number of encoding iterations for choosing the best intramode when compared with RDO-based decision.

The architecture was synthesized to FPGA and achieved an operation frequency of 98 MHz processing more than 300 HD1080p frames per second.

With this approach, we achieved one order-of-magnitude performance improvement compared with RDO-based approaches, which is very important not only from the performance but also from the energy consumption perspective for battery-operated devices.

In order to compare the architecture with previously published works, we also synthesized it to standard cells.

Compared with the best previous results reported, the implemented architecture achieves a complexity reduction of five times, a processing capability increase of 14 times, and a reduction in the number of clock cycles per MB of 11 times.