Guided filter based intra mode accelerator for HEVC

In order to support fast communication of multimedia contents, the encoding complexity of the state of the art encoder i.e. High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is reduced by proposing a fast intra mode selection process in this paper. The complexity is reduced by proposing a unique and novel model that incorporates the concept of Guided Filter (GF). In this article, the output of GF is used as weights for the intra modes; The GF is used in the same way as any other filter that takes into account some pixels and return a single value (e.g. average). Secondly, the ‘guidance’ parameter of GF is obtained using spatial/ temporal information about the block in order to efficiently handle the current problem. Thirdly, statistical evidences are presented to prove the feasibility of GF for early mode decision. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed GF based model speeded up the HEVC by 30.50%, while Bjontegaard Delta Bit Rate (BD-BR) is only 1.21%. Moreover, the encoding time is improved by 2.28% while saving 1.68% BD-BR when compared with the cutting edge work in the intra field.