VLSI implementation of a fast intra prediction algorithm for H.264/AVC encoding

Intra-frame coding is one of the most important technologies in H.264/AVC, which made significant contributions to the enhancement of coding efficiency of H.264/AVC at the cost of computation complexity. To address this problem, in this paper we present an efficient VLSI implementation of a computation efficient intra prediction algorithm for H.264/AVC encoding. Unlike most of existing fast intra-mode selection techniques, in the proposed method the directional differences are computed using a few selected original pixels to obtain the candidate modes with the minimal direction cost. The proposed method is hardware-friendly and provides more processing parallelism for H.264 intra-frame encoding with less overhead and less power consumption, which is expected to be utilized as a favourable accelerator hardware module in a real-time HDTV (1920×1080p) H.264 encoder.