Prefiltering Effect On HEVC Intra Prediction Module

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) among the latest video coding standards, which guarantees a large progress especially in compression efficiency compared to its predecessors. The improvement of intra prediction created from flexible block partitioning and developed directional prediction. The new standard provides higher compression efficiency but with an increase in the coding complexity and therefore computational effort. This paper is premised on the idea that accounting for the directional information of a block is truly significant in order to further improve the prediction quality. The intention of prefiltering the reference samples is to decrease the energy of the resulting residual blocks. Hence, reducing the bit rate while improving visual appearance of the predicted block is obtained even without applying deblocking filter. Experimental results show that an average of 4.63% increase in deblocking filter coding time is observed while disabling prefiltering process. This will induce an overall increase in encoding time by an average of 1.01% and a loss of 0.12% in bitrate while maintaining the same visual quality.