Sparse Representation-Based Intra Prediction for Lossless/Near Lossless Video Coding

In this paper, a novel intra prediction method is presented for lossless/near lossless High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), termed as Sparse Representation based Intra Prediction (SRIP). In specific, the existing Angular Intra Prediction (AIP) modes in HEVC are organized as a mode dictionary, which is utilized to sparsely represent the visual signal by minimizing the difference with respect to the ground truth. For the match of encoding and decoding, the sparse coefficients are also required to be encoded and transmitted to the decoder side. To further improve the coding performance, an additional binary flag is included in the video codec to indicate which strategy is finally adopted with the rate distortion optimization, i.e., SRIP or traditional AIP. Extensive experimental results reveal that the proposed method can achieve 0.36% bit rate saving on average in case of lossless scenario.