A FAST INTRA PREDICTION MODE SELECTION METHOD IN H.264/AVC SCALABLE VIDEO CODING

In this paper, we propose a fast intra prediction mode selection method in Scalable Video Coding(SVC) which is an emerging video coding standard as an extension of H.264/Advanced Video Coding(H.264/AVC). The proposed method decides a candidate intra prediction mode based on the characteristic of macroblock smoothness. Statistical analysis is applied to computing that smoothness in spatial enhancement layer. We also propose an early termination scheme for Intra_BL mode decision where the RD cost value of Intra_BL is utilized. Compared with JSVM software, our scheme can reduce about 55% of the computation complexity of intra prediction on average, while the performance degradation is negligible; For low QP values, the average PSNR loss is very negligible, equivalently the bit rate increases by 0.01%. For high QP values, the average PSNR loss is less than 0.01dB, which equals to 0.25% increase in bitrate on average.