An Efficient Statistical Intra-mode Prediction Method for H.264

H.264 is a new codec that achieves roughly half of the bit-savings over MPEG2 and MPEG4 for a given quality. One of the features of H.264 is that allows intra frames to be predicted from previously encoded macroblocks in the same frame. This prediction is currently based on a simple algorithm that utilizes the encoded modes of the adjacent macroblocks. While this method is fast, it is often inaccurate, especially at high bitrates. In this paper a new adaptive statistical method is proposed that increases prediction accuracy by over 100% in certain situations. This improvement in accuracy results in the reduction of bits required for each intra frame