Combined Prediction Mode for AVS

Abstract

Audio Video Coding Standard (AVS) is Chinese new audio and video coding standard, which provides close performance to H.264/AVC main profile with lower complexity. Like H.264/AVC, prediction plays an important role in AVS. A macroblock (MB) uses either Intra or Inter prediction to exploit spatial and temporal correlation to achieve good compression efficiency. In this paper, a new coding technique based on combined prediction is proposed for AVS. Based on the distribution analysis of residuals generated by Intra prediction and Inter prediction, the characteristics in both spatial and temporal domain are utilized to combine two selected modes Intra_8×8_DC and Inter_P_16×16 together. The limited complexity increase and the standard compatibility are discussed for the proposed combined prediction mode (CPM). Experimental results show that by applying the proposed CPM to the AVS rate-distortion optimized encoding flow, up to 2.70% bit rate reduction for CIF sequences and 1.57% for 720p sequences are achieved, because it generates the more precise prediction and has minimal complexity increase both in the encoder and decoder.