Abstract
Intra mode selection and motion estimation for spatial and temporal prediction play important roles for achieving high video compression ratio in the latest video coding standards, such as H.264/AVC However, both components take most of the computational cost in the video encoding process. In this paper, we propose an efficient intra mode prediction algorithm based on using the mode conditional probability learned from a large amount of training video sequences with the ground truth modes of each block to be encoded and its neighboring block modes as well as its associated image content features. By applying the proposed intra-mode selection algorithm into the H.264 reference code, we show significant reduction of the computation time with negligible video quality degradation for H.264 video encoding. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.