A Low – Power VLSI Architecture for Intra Prediction in H.264

The H.264 video coding standard can achieve considerably higher coding efficiency than previous standards. The key to this high code efficiency are mainly the Intra and Inter prediction modes provided by the standard. However, the compression efficiency of the H264 standard comes at the cost of increased complexity of the encoder. Therefore it is very important to design video architectures that minimize the cost of the prediction modes in terms of area, power dissipation and design complexity. A common aspect of the Inter and Intra Prediction modes, is the Sum of Absolute Differences (SAD). In this paper we present a new algorithm that can replace the SAD in Intra Prediction, and which provides a more efficient hardware implementation.