A Novel computational complexity and power reduction technique for H.264 intra prediction

H.264 intra prediction algorithm has a very high computational complexity. This paper proposes a novel technique for reducing the amount of computations performed by H.264 intra prediction algorithm and therefore reducing the power consumption of H.264 intra prediction hardware significantly without any PSNR and bitrate loss. The proposed technique performs a small number of comparisons among neighboring pixels of the current block before the intra prediction process. If the neighboring pixels of the current block are equal, the prediction equations of H.264 intra prediction modes simplify significantly for this block. By exploiting the equality of the neighboring pixels, the proposed technique reduces the amount of computations performed by 4x4 luminance, 16x16 luminance, and 8x8 chrominance prediction modes up to 60%, 28%, and 68% respectively with a small comparison overhead. We also implemented an efficient 4x4 intra prediction hardware including the proposed technique using Verilog HDL. We quantified the impact of the proposed technique on the power consumption of this hardware on a Xilinx Virtex II FPGA using Xilinx XPower, and it reduced the power consumption of this hardware up to 18.6%.