This option exists in VP8, and it was rewritten in VP9 to support
skipping on different partition levels. After prediction is done,
we can check if the residuals in the partition block will be all
quantized to 0. If this is true, the skip flag is set, and only
prediction data are needed in reconstruction. Based on DCT's energy
conservation property, the skipping check can be estimated in
spatial domain.
The prediction error is calculated and compared to a threshold.
The threshold is determined by the dequant values, and also
adjusted by partition sizes. To be precise, the DC and AC parts
for Y, U, and V planes are checked to decide skipping or not.
Test showed that
1. derf set:
when static-thresh = 1, psnr loss is 0.666%;
when static-thresh = 500, psnr loss is 1.162%;
2. stdhd set:
when static-thresh = 1, psnr loss is 1.249%;
when static-thresh = 500, psnr loss is 1.668%;
For different clips, encoding speedup range is between several
percentage and 20+% when static-thresh <= 500. For example,
clip bitrate static-thresh psnr time
akiyo(cif) 500 0 48.923 5.635s(50f)
akiyo 500 500 48.863 4.402s(50f)