A New Block-Based Method for HEVC Intra Coding

This paper presents a new block-based method for the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) intra coding. First, we have found through analysis and test that the prediction errors on some pixels in each prediction block (PB) that are neighboring to the reference pixels would be no bigger than the corresponding coding errors. Based on this observation, the pixels in each PB are divided into two parts: half pixels are coded via a novel padding technique together with a constrained quantization algorithm (leading to around 3 dB gain under the same bit rate), whereas the other half are reconstructed by linear interpolations along a prediction direction by utilizing the neighboring reference pixels and the first half coded pixels. In the final implementation, a competition mechanism is employed between this new method and the original HEVC intra coding in order to choose the best mode for each PB. Experimental results show that about 2% BD-rate reduction has been achieved both for luma and chroma with respect to the original HEVC intra coding, whereas the encoder complexity increases by 130%, but the decoding time remains nearly unchanged.