A Fast Intra Prediction Algorithm for H.264

Transporting hybrid coded video over wireless channel is very challenging. Efficient coding and compression techniques are required to meet the QoS (Quality of Service) requirements of such services. H.264, the latest coding and compression standard from ITU-T, is currently dominating the field by offering a flexible architecture and compression gain of up to 50%. In H.264, intra frame prediction is conducted in the spatial domain. There are two types of intra prediction for luma-Intra_16times16 and Intra_4times4. Four and nine modes are supported respectively. The complexity and computation load increase drastically. A fast mode decision algorithm for H.264 intra prediction is presented in this paper. The algorithm predicts every macroblock using macroblock features before coding, then selects parts of the prediction modes. Experimental results show that the proposed fast algorithm can achieve 30% to 60% computation reduction while maintaining similar PSNR and bit rate performance of H.264 encoder.