Predicting zero coefficients for High Efficiency Video Coding

Similar to previous video coding standards, transform and quantization are used in the most recent video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) and a large number of transform coefficients are quantized to zeros. In order to reduce the computations involved in transform and quantization in HEVC, a prediction approach based on Gaussian model is proposed to predict zero quantized transform coefficients within the 4 × 4, 8 × 8, 16 × 16 and 32 × 32 blocks. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is able to effectively predict zero coefficients and thus reduce redundant computations while keeping the video quality and compression efficiency almost intact.