Efficient Intra Mode Selection using Image Structure Tensor for H.264/AVC

Intra mode decision and motion estimation for spatial and temporal prediction play important roles for achieving high video compression ratio in the latest video coding standard H.264/AVC. However, both components take most of the computational cost in the video encoding process. In this paper, we propose an efficient intra mode prediction algorithm based on image structure tensor analysis. The image structure tensor can provide the local image structure information for making the intra-mode decision. We show significant reduction of the computation time with negligible video quality degradation for H.264 video encoding by implementation into JM reference program .