Fast intra-mode decision method for luma and chroma blocks for H.264/AVC

This paper presents a fast and efficient intra-mode decision method for H.264/AVC. The proposed method makes use of several directional measures that are based not only on the pixels in an image block but also on the neighboring pixels. As a result, the proposed method can predict the dominant direction of an image block more accurately than the other methods. It also considers various kinds of candidate modes, while efficiently controlling the number of modes to be examined. In the chroma mode decision, the proposed method uses the correlation between the chroma mode and the 16 × 16 luma mode to reduce the encoding complexity. By combining all these techniques in an efficient way, the proposed method not only improves the coding performance, but also reduces the encoding time significantly compared to conventional intra-mode decision methods.