Improved Combined Intra Prediction For Higher Video Compression Efficiency

Intra prediction is an important component of video compression. The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard supports advanced Intra prediction tools to achieve remarkable Intra coding performance. However, higher compression efficiency performance may be achieved using Combined Intra Prediction (CIP). CIP consists in combining conventional Intra reference samples, with samples extracted from within the current block being encoded. In this paper, an improvement to the original CIP approach is proposed to achieve higher compression efficiency. Due to the fact the encoder does not have access to reconstruction samples while compressing a block, a controlled drift occurs at the block level between the Intra prediction blocks generated at the encoder and decoder when using CIP. The proposed approach aims at reducing such a drift, hence improving CIP performance. This Improved CIP is able to achieve up to 1.4 % BD-rate savings with respect to the HEVC reference software. The paper also proposes the combination of Improved CIP with an additional tool for enhancing the accuracy of Intra prediction. Up to 1.9 % BD-rate savings can be achieved using this approach.