New Approach to Complexity Reduction of Intra Prediction in Advanced Multimedia Compression

Abstract

H.264 is the new multimedia compression standard developed by VCEG and MPEG. In order to maximize the compression performance, H.264 adopts RDO mode decision techniques at the cost of very remarkable computational complexity. To reduce encoder complexity associated with the intra-prediction mode selection, in this paper, a fast intra prediction mode selection scheme is proposed. It is based on three improvement parts, including improvement of the intra prediction algorithm structure, fast selection between intra 4×4 block mode and intra 16×16 block mode, and the fast 4×4 luma block mode selection based on the luma similarity between reference pixels. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms Pan’s method, and compared with the test model JM8.6 provided by JVT, the proposed scheme reduces 83.10% coding time for intra frames and 50.94% coding time for all the frames while maintaining the PSNR and bit rate.