Enhanced Intra-4$,times,$4 Mode Decision for H.264/AVC Coders

In this paper, we propose an enhanced rate-distortion cost function, which combines the sum of absolute integer-transformed differences (SAITD) and a rate predictor for H.264/AVC intra-4times4 mode decision. To reduce the computation of the SAITD, we further develop a fast computation algorithm, which successfully uses the property of linear transform and the fixed spatial relationship of predicted pixels in intra-modes. Simulation results show that the enhanced cost function with less computation achieves better coding performance than the cost function suggested in H.264 reference software JM 6.1d