  The intent of the H.264 AVC project was to create a standard capable of
providing good video quality at substantially lower bit rates than previous
standards without increasing the complexity of design so much that it would be
impractical or excessively expensive to implement. An additional goal was to
provide enough flexibility to allow the standard to be applied to a wide
variety of applications. To achieve better coding efficiency, H.264 AVC uses
several techniques such as inter mode and intra mode prediction with variable
size motion compensation, which adopts Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO). This
increases the computational complexity of the encoder especially for devices
with lower processing capabilities such as mobile and other handheld devices.
In this paper, we propose an algorithm to reduce the number of mode and sub
mode evaluations in inter mode prediction. Experimental results show that this
fast intra mode selection algorithm can lessen about 75 percent encoding time
with little loss of bit rate and visual quality.
