Effectively detecting all-zero DCT blocks for H.264 optimization

This paper presents a novel efficient algorithm to reduce redundant DCT and quantization computations for H.264 encoding. A theoretical analysis is performed to study the sufficient condition for DCT coefficients to be quantized to zeros in H.264. As a result, a more tight sufficient condition is derived to early detect all-zero 4x4 DCT blocks. Compared with other algorithms, the proposed algorithm provides a more precise and efficient condition to predict all-zero DCT blocks. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms in terms of all the evaluated performances. ©2006 IEEE.