Efficient Compression Algorithm for H.264/AVC Intra-prediction Using an Activity Map

H.264/AVC, the international video coding standard developed by ITU-T VCEG and ISO/IEC MPEG, is known to be more efficient than other standards. Higher compression is provided with the parameter block mode of H.264/AVC, but due to its low compression efficiency, researchers tend to ignore the algorithm´s intra-prediction coding capability. This study examined this overlooked aspect to determine its impact on compression efficiency and identify potential adverse effects. This paper proposes a novel algorithm to boost efficiency using an activity map for the pixel unit of respective prediction block in conjunction with specific thresholds. Experimental results reveal that compared to the existing H.264/AVC algorithm, the proposed algorithm shows a significant improvement of over 0.35% in the compression efficiency without any increase in overall encoding time and PSNR complexity.