Fast Intra Prediction Based on the Texture Feature for H.264/AVC Encoding

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 a fast intra prediction algorithm including block type decision and candidate modes decision based on the texture detection of 4x4 blocks.After the texture feature of every 4x4 subblock in a macroblock by template matching is achieved,the proper block type is firstly chosen based on the deviation of subblocks'edge strengths among a macrock Then for the chosen block type,the candidate modes are further decided based on the edge direction of current blocks.Experimental results show that the proposed fast algorithm can achieve 74% time saving on average for encoding the all intra-frame sequence with little loss of coding performance with the reference software.