RGB video coding using the matched neighbourhood block in the inter-color plane

H.264/AVC High 4:4:4 Intra/Predictive profiles supports RGB 4:4:4 sequences for high fidelity video. RGB color planes rather than YCbCr color planes are preferred by high-fidelity video applications such as digital cinema, medical imaging, and UHDTV. Several RGB coding tools have therefore been developed to improve the coding efficiency of RGB video. In this paper, we propose a new method to extract more accurate correlation parameters for inter-plane prediction. We use a searching method to determine the matched macroblock (MB) that has a similar inter-color relation to the current MB. Using this block, we can infer more accurate correlation parameters to predict chroma MB from luma MB. Our proposed inter-plane prediction mode shows an average bits saving of 15.6% and a PSNR increase of 0.99 dB compared with H.264 high4:4:4 intra-profile RGB coding. Furthermore, extensive performance evaluation revealed that our proposed algorithm has better coding efficiency than existing algorithms.