An Interpolation Method by Predicting the Direction of Pixel Texture Changing Trend for H.264/AVC Intra Prediction

Intra prediction is employed by H.264/AVC in the pixel domain and plays a significant role in the improvement of the coding efficiency. By analyzing the H.264 intra prediction interpolation, we find that there are two problems exist: Firstly, the method does not make full use of the information because for most prediction modes, only 30% to 60% of reference pixels are used; secondly, the change of pixels in the same texture direction can not be reflected. It is on the assumption that all pixels are the same and simply copy the reference value. Focusing on the above problems, we propose a new intra prediction interpolation which uses the rest of the reference pixels to predict the direction of pixel texture changing trends. The experiments show that the new intra prediction interpolation method could achieve better rate-distortion performance with a little increase of computing complexity.