A fast intra prediction method for H.264/AVC based on SMP algorithm

H.264/AVC employs intra coding technique to reduce spatial redundancies. In order to improve the coding performance, H.264/AVC utilizes various modes and the rate-distortion (R-D) optimization method to select an optimum mode. Since the encoder computes RD costs of all possible coding modes to find the best coding result, it introduces high computational complexity. In order to alleviate the encoder computation load, a fast intra prediction algorithm is proposed. The proposed algorithm uses the variance-based classification of texture complexity method based on SMP algorithm to further degrade the complexity of encoder. In the simulation results, compared to SMP, the proposed method is verified to reduce the entire coding time by about 20% with acceptable coding loss. In comparing proposed method with reference software, the proposed method achieves time reduction about 23% and a bit-rate reduction of 0.707%, averagely.