Neural network-based arithmetic coding of intra prediction modes in HEVC

In both H.264 and HEVC, context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) is adopted as the entropy coding method. CABAC relies on manually designed binarization processes as well as handcrafted context models, which may restrict the compression efficiency. In this paper, we propose an arithmetic coding strategy by training neural networks, and make preliminary studies on coding of the intra prediction modes in HEVC. Instead of binarization, we propose to directly estimate the probability distribution of the 35 intra prediction modes with the adoption of a multi-level arithmetic codec. Instead of handcrafted context models, we utilize convolutional neural network (CNN) to perform the probability estimation. Simulation results show that our proposed arithmetic coding leads to as high as 9.9% bits saving compared with CABAC.