A hybrid fast mode decision method for H.264/AVC intra prediction

Abstract

It has been well demonstrated that edge information can be utilized for intra mode decision in H.264/AVC to reduce the computational complexity. In spite of the remarkable speedup for mode decision, the existing edge detection based solution always shows relatively high coding loss due to inaccurate mode selection. In this work, a novel fast intra mode decision based on a more precise direction representation scheme is proposed, which exploits the gradation along the prediction direction as well as the differential between the original pixels and their predicted ones. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed method can averagely achieve about 0.05 dB peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) gain and 1.1% bit rate (BR) decrease with negligible computational complexity increase, compared with the state-of-the-art edge detection method.