Fast intra-prediction algorithm in H264
Hua-Gen Xu · Journal of Zhejiang University(Science Edition) · 2006
Intra-prediction is an important feature in the new H.264 video coding standard.It predicts the current block with surrounding pixels to reduce the special redundancies and improves coding efficiency of H.264 greatly.However,there are 9 and 4 candidate modes for 4×4 and 16×16 intra-prediction respectively.The full search algorithm used to select the best mode is computationally expensive.To reduce its complexity,a fast intra-prediction algorithm was proposed.Based on the all I-frame coding,it took advantage of the strong correlations in temporal domain,spatial domain and different block-sizes to predict the best mode of the current block.An early termination mechanism was further incorporated to avoid unnecessary computations when a good decision can be made in early stage.Experimental results show that compared to full search,the proposed method can reduce 50%~75% computational load of the intra-prediction while the quality degradation is negligible.