Decoder-Side Intra Mode Derivation for Next Generation Video Coding

Modern video compression solutions rely on intra-prediction to exploit spatial redundancy within a frame. In this paper, a new intra-prediction scheme is presented whereby one or more prediction directions are inferred at the decoder side by means of a texture analysis process. The inferred directions are then combined by means of prediction fusion, to compute the final predicted samples. No further information is required in the bitstream, considerably limiting the amount of bits necessary to be transmitted in order to derive the prediction block at the decoder. Experiments in the context of the state-of-the-art Versatile Video Coding standard show the proposed method can improve coding efficiency by -0.63% BD-rates on average, and up to -1.04% on larger resolution sequences, with limited impact on the decoder complexity.