Fast intra mode decision algorithm based on refinement in HEVC

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the next generation video compression standard providing significant coding performance. It adopts 35 intra prediction modes with larger CU size to improve the intra encoding efficiency, so that cause a high computational complexity. In this paper, two fast intra-prediction algorithms are proposed to reduce the number of candidate modes for rate-distortion (RD) optimization. We obtain an optimal adjacent modes (OAM) list consisting of dominant directions through the analysis of costs of several general direction modes. Furthermore, we improve the most probable mode (MPM) algorithm to make full use of the spatial correlation between neighbour prediction blocks instead of simply merging the prediction modes of neighbour prediction blocks into the candidate list. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithms can reduce about 27.3% of the encoding time compared to the HEVC test model 14.0, while the decrease of coding quality is negligible.