Improved intra mode signaling for HEVC

In the current development of HEVC, compression performance improved significantly compared to H.264/AVC for both inter pictures and intra pictures. With intra compression, the main reason for this improvement is the large in crease in intra prediction directions (up to 34). The downside of having a larger number of modes is that they increase the signaling overhead in the bitstream. In this paper, a low complexity intra mode prediction algorithm is proposed which improves the mode prediction accuracy. This is achieved by exploiting the correlation between the prediction directions of the neighboring prediction units and that of the encoded prediction unit. As a result, more efficient intra mode signaling can be achieved with minimal impact on encoder and decoder complexity. On average, 0.33% bitrate improvement is obtained by employing the proposed algorithm. For sequences that are encoded with a high number of directional intra modes, around 1% bitrate improvement is measured.