Intra prediction mode selection for flicker reduction in H.264/AVC

The H.264/AVC adopted an intra prediction scheme that enables high coding efficiency for intra-coded frames. However, the intra prediction scheme of H.264/AVC may cause flicker in intra-coded frames if the intra prediction modes are not appropriately selected for coding. In this paper, we propose an intra prediction mode selection method for H.264/ AVC by using a modified distortion measure for rate distortion optimized mode selection that does not only consider the distortion between the input and the reconstructed macroblocks, but also the between-frame consistency of distortion between two successive frames to reduce flicker in intra-coded frames. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method reduces significant amount of flicker with a negligible change in PSNR and bitrate.