A Memory Compression Method for Avoiding Perceivable Distortion Due to Intra-Prediction in H.264 Decoders

This paper analyzes the video-quality degradation mechanism in an H.264 decoder with memory compression and proposes a new DPCM memory compression method which avoids that degradation. When memory compression methods used in MPEG-2 decoders are applied to H.264 decoders, heavy degradation sometimes occurs because H.264 employs directional spatial prediction in intra-coding. The proposed method avoids such degradation by deploying DPCM base points to intra reference pixels in order to protect them from compression distortion. Simulation results show that the proposed method significantly improves video-quality, in the best case by 7.51 dB in PSNR, over that of conventional methods, and subjective quality is also improved.