Angular intra prediction in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)

New video coding solutions, such as the HEVC (High Efficiency Video Coding) standard being developed by JCT-VC (Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding), are typically designed for high resolution video content. Increasing video resolution creates two basic requirements for practical video codecs; those need to be able to provide compression efficiency superior to prior video coding solutions and the computational requirements need to be aligned with the foreseeable hardware platforms. This paper proposes an intra prediction method which is designed to provide high compression efficiency and which can be implemented effectively in resource constrained environments making it applicable to wide range of use cases. When designing the method, special attention was given to the algorithmic definition of the prediction sample generation, in order to be able to utilize the same reconstruction process at different block sizes. The proposed method outperforms earlier variations of the same family of technologies significantly and consistently across different classes of video material, and has recently been adopted as the directional intra prediction method for the draft HEVC standard. Experimental results show that the proposed method outperforms the H.264/AVC intra prediction approach on average by 4.8 %. For sequences with dominant directional structures, the coding efficiency gains become more significant and exceed 10 %.