High Speed Intra Prediction Scheme for H.264/AVC

In this paper, a novel pipelined intra prediction scheme with prediction mode scheduling is proposed to design H.264/AVC video encoder for high-definition TV (HDTV) applications such as HD camcorder. Since the intra prediction of the current 4times4 block cannot be performed before the reconstruction of a previous 4times4 block, intra 4times4 prediction cannot be pipelined for high speed implementation. By rearranging the encoding order of intra 4times4 prediction, the proposed scheme can be pipelined while maintaining consistency with the standard. In order to further increase the hardware utilization, the prediction order of the nine intra 4times4 prediction modes is scheduled depending on the required pixels to generate the predicted images. With the proposed scheme, the intra 4times4 prediction can be pipelined, and the bubble between the blocks can be decreased without the performance degradation. Since the processing time is reduced by up to 41%, it can save the hardware resource. Thus, the proposed scheme can be a good solution for realtime HD sized encoding applications.