Frequency-Domain Intra Prediction Analysis and Processing for High-Quality Video Coding

Most of the advances in video coding technology focus on applications that require low bitrates, for example, for content distribution on a mass scale. For these applications, the performance of conventional coding methods is typically sufficient. Such schemes inevitably introduce large losses to the signal, which are unacceptable for numerous other professional applications such as capture, production, and archiving. To boost the performance of video codecs for high-quality content, better techniques are needed especially in the context of the prediction module. An analysis of conventional intra prediction methods used in the state-of-the-art High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard is reported in this paper, in terms of the prediction performance of such methods in the frequency domain. Appropriately modified encoder and decoder schemes are presented and used for this paper. The analysis shows that conventional intra prediction methods can be improved, especially for high frequency components of the signal which are typically difficult to predict. A novel approach to improve the efficiency of high-quality video coding is also presented in this paper based on such analysis. The modified encoder scheme allows for an additional stage of processing performed on the transformed prediction to replace selected frequency components of the signal with specifically defined synthetic content. The content is introduced in the signal using feature-dependent lookup tables. The approach is shown to achieve consistent gains against conventional HEVC with up to -5.2% coding gains in terms of bitrate savings.