Adaptive Rate-Distortion Prediction for Multiple Reference Selection and Inter-mode Decision

Abstract. To minimize Rate-Distortion (RD) cost in video coding, RD Optimization (RDO) technique is adopted, which also brings increas-ingly computational complexity in Motion Estimation (ME), multiple reference selection and mode decision. In this paper, a Gaussian model based adaptive RD cost prediction method is developed to jointly speed up multiple reference selection and inter-mode decision. Besides the abil-ity of achieving good coding efficiency with much reduced computational power, our method is also with two major advantages. First, it can achieve robust performance, including computational complexity reduc-tion and almost intact video quality, with a wide range of video sequences resolutions and even for various scene changes; second, it could be either individually used or combined with the other efficient mode decision al-gorithms, and in both cases, our method could achieve remarkable per