A New Method for Estimating Intra Prediction Mode in H.264/AVC

Abstract

In order to reduce spatial redundancies, the H.264/AVC Intra coding provides nine directional prediction modes including DC prediction for every 4×4 block, but it needs a lot of overhead bits to represent the nine directional prediction modes for every 4×4 block. To compress the directional mode bits efficiently, the most probable mode is estimated by using the correlation between the prediction mode of spatially adjacent blocks and that of the current block. In this paper, a new method for estimating the most probable mode is proposed by using the directional information of the prediction mode of the adjacent blocks. Experimental results show that the proposed method is able to achieve a coding gain of about 0.2dB on average at low bit rate.