On a Highly Efficient RDO-Based Mode Decision Pipeline Design for AVS

Abstract

Rate distortion optimization (RDO) is the best known mode decision method, while the high implementation complexity limits its applications and almost no real-time hardware encoder is truly full-featured RDO based. In this paper, first, a full-featured RDO-based mode decision (MD) algorithm is presented, which makes more modes enter RDO process. Second, the throughput of RDO-based MD pipeline is thoroughly analyzed and modeled. Third, a highly efficient adaptive block-level pipelining architecture of RDO-based MD for AVS video encoder is proposed which can achieve the highest throughput to alleviate the RDO burden. Our design is described in high-level Verilog/VHDL hardware description language and implemented under SMIC 0.18-mu m CMOS technology with 232 K logic gates and 85 Kb SRAMs. The implementation results validate our architectural design and the proposed architecture can support real time processing of 1080P@30 fps. The coding efficiency of our adopted method far outperforms (0.57 dB PSNR gain in average) the traditional low-complexity MD (LCMD) methods and the throughput of our designed pipeline is increased by 11.3%, 19% and 17% for I, P and B frames, respectively, compared with the existed RDO-based architecture.