A high performance and low complexity sampling-based intra coding method for H.264/AVC

The H.264/AVC video coding standard can achieves higher compression performance than previous video coding standards, such as MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and H.263. Especially, in order to obtain the high coding performance in intra pictures, the H.264/AVC encoder employs various directional spatial prediction modes and the rate-distortion (RD) optimization technique inducing high computational complexity. For further improvement in the coding performance with the low computational complexity, we introduce a sampling-based intra coding method. The proposed method generates two sub-images, which are defined as a sampled sub-image and a prediction error sub-image in this paper, from an original image through horizontal or vertical sampling and prediction processes, and then each sub-image is encoded with different intra prediction modes, quantization parameters, and scanning patterns. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the intra coding performance and reduces the encoding complexity with the smaller number of the RD cost calculation process.

► We introduce the sampling-based coding method for intra pictures in H.264/AVC. ► The proposed method generates two sub-images from an original image. ► Each sub-image is encoded with different coding technologies. ► The proposed method is more efficient than the original method of H.264/AVC. ► The proposed method is highly compatible with the KTA tools.