Edge-Preserving Reference Sample Filtering and Mode-Dependent Interpolation for Intra-Prediction

High Efficiency Video Coding is the latest video compression standard, which achieves the best coding performance up until now. Specifically, intra prediction is a tool that removes spatial redundancy in a single frame and then a predictor is generated from its neighboring reference samples based on a specific interpolation scheme. In this paper, we propose an edge-preserving intra reference sample filtering method using a bilateral filter, which is implemented as hardware-friendly. Two parameters of the bilateral filter are modeled by block size and mean amplitude of the pixel intensity. In addition, a mode-dependent interpolation scheme is proposed, which takes the directionality of angular predictions into account. The experimental results show that a BD rate-reduction of 0.63% can be achieved for all intra configurations by combining the two methods. We also demonstrate that the subjective quality of the reconstructed frames can be improved.