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A fast two-step block type decision algorithm for intra prediction in H.264/AVC high profile

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Abstract

Intra coding in H.264/AVC can significantly improve the compression efficiency but at the cost of high computational complexity. To reduce the complexity, this paper presents an efficient block type decision algorithm for intra prediction. In H.264/AVC high profile, three kinds of block types are supported. This algorithm determines the optimal block type by two steps. The first step is based on the fact that the block type of intra prediction is highly dependent on the smoothness of macroblock. An edge-based feature is introduced to characterize the smoothness, by comparing it with two thresholds impossible block type is firstly filtered out. Then the second step is based on the correlation of block type chosen for different chroma modes. Experimental results show that the proposed fast algorithm can achieve 72.8% time saving on average for encoding the all intra-frame sequence with average 0.75% bit rate increase and 0.05dB PSNR degradation when comparing with the reference software.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors and the reviewers for their hard work and their helpful suggestions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Room 454, School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Xi’an Jiaotong University, No. 28 Xianning West Road, Xi’an, 710049, China

    Ping Wang, Hua Huang & Zheng Tan

Authors
  1. Ping Wang
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  2. Hua Huang
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  3. Zheng Tan
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Ping Wang.

Additional information

This research was supported in part by the China National 973 Program under Project No. 2010CB327900 and an open funding project from Key Laboratory,

Shenzhen University, China.

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Wang, P., Huang, H. & Tan, Z. A fast two-step block type decision algorithm for intra prediction in H.264/AVC high profile. Multimed Tools Appl 60, 139–160 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-011-0807-0

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