Three-Level Storage Structure of Reference Pixels of H.264 Intra Prediction

Intra prediction of H.264 encoder is to reduce spatial redundancy of image compression code. Intra prediction has up to 17 prediction modes, different modes have different ways to read reference pixel and to store. With so many prediction modes, how to deal with memory and how to read of reference pixels becomes more important. To reduce cycles of intra prediction, this paper employs an optimized hardware architecture, making intra 4×4 prediction and intra 16×16 prediction in parallel, and changes the order of intra 4×4 prediction. In this paper, a three-level storage structure of reference pixels is proposed, which saves storage resource and reduces access time. It takes at most 496 cycles to finish intra prediction of a MB in this paper and the execution time is reduced by 29.5%.