Flicker Reduction in Intra Coded Frames of H.264/AVC

The H.264/AVC video coding standard adopted a new intra prediction technique that enables high coding efficiency for intra coded frames. However, it is known to produce more flickers in intra coded frames when the modes are selected based on conventional rate distortion optimized mode decision methods. In this paper, we propose to use a modified distortion measure for rate distortion optimized mode decision to reduce flicker in intra coded frames of H.264/AVC. Experimental results show that our proposed method can reduce significant amount of flicker maintaining similar PSNR and bitrate.