Patent ID: 8804837

Claim:
A method of selecting a mode to encode video data, the method comprising the steps of: transforming a source video frame into a set of coefficients; determining, in a defined cycle, one of a plurality of encoding modes for each coefficient of the set of coefficients, said defined cycle including: partitioning said set of coefficients into a first plurality of subsets of the coefficients based on specified probability statistics corresponding to the plurality of encoding modes; computing defined parameters of a probability distribution for each of the subsets of the coefficients; selecting one of the encoding modes for each of the coefficients based on a weighted sum of said computed defined parameters; and re-partitioning the set of coefficients into a second plurality of subsets of the coefficients based on the encoding modes selected for the coefficients; and outputting the second plurality of subsets of the coefficients to a video encoder to encode each of the subsets of the coefficients using the one of the encoding modes selected for the coefficients of said each of the second plurality of subsets of the coefficients.