An Approximate HEVC Intra Angular Prediction Hardware

In this paper, an approximate High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) intra angular prediction technique is proposed for reducing area of HEVC intra prediction hardware. The proposed approximation technique uses closer neighboring pixels instead of distant neighboring pixels in intra angular prediction equations. It causes 0.0569% bit rate increase and 0.0028 dB PSNR loss on average. In this paper, an approximate HEVC intra angular prediction hardware implementing the proposed approximation technique is also proposed. FPGA and ASIC implementations of the proposed approximate hardware can process 24 and 40 quad full HD (3840 × 2160) video frames per second, respectively. The proposed approximate HEVC intra angular prediction hardware is the smallest and the second fastest HEVC intra prediction hardware in the literature. It is ten times smaller and 20% slower than the fastest HEVC intra prediction hardware in the literature.