Intra-prediction for Video Coding with Neural Networks

Abstract: Intra-prediction is a method for coding standalone frames in video coding. Until now, this has mainly been done using linear formulae. Using an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) may improve the prediction accuracy, leading to improved coding efficiency. In this degree project, Fully Connected Networks (FCN) and Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) were used for intra-prediction. Experiments were done on samples from different image sizes, block sizes, and block contents, and their effect on the results were compared and discussed. The results show that ANN methods have the potential to perform better or on par with the video coder High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) in the intra-prediction task. The proposed ANN designs perform better on smaller block sizes, but different designs could lead to better performance on larger block sizes. It was found that training one network for each HEVC mode and using the most suitable network to predict each block improved performance of the ANN approach.