A New Rate-Distortion Optimization Using Structural Information in H.264 I-Frame Encoder

Rate-distortion optimization is the key technique in video coding standards to efficiently determine a set of coding parameters. In the R-D optimization for H.264 I-frame encoder, the distortion (D) is measured as the sum of the squared differences (SSD) between the reconstructed and the original blocks, which is same as MSE. Recently, a new image measurement called Structural Similarity (SSIM) based on the degradation of structural information was brought forward. It is proved that the SSIM can provide a better approximation to the perceived image distortion than the currently used PSNR (or MSE). In this paper, a new rate-distortion optimization for H.264 I-frame encoder using SSIM as the distortion metric is proposed. Experiment results show that the proposed algorithm can reduced 2.2~6.45% bit rate while maintaining the perceptual quality.