Residual DPCM in HEVC Transform Skip Mode for Screen Content Coding

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) adopts intra transform skip mode, in which a residual block is directly quantized in the pixel domain without transforming the block into the frequency domain. Intra transform skip mode provides a significant coding gain for screen content. However, when intra-prediction errors are not transformed, the errors are often correlated along the intra-prediction direction. This paper introduces a residual differential pulse code modulation (DPCM) method for the intra-predicted and transform-skipped blocks to remove redundancy. The proposed method performs pixel-by-pixel residual prediction along the intra-prediction direction to reduce the dynamic range of intra-prediction errors. Experimental results show that the transform skip mode's Bjøntegaard delta rate (BD-rate) is improved by 12.8% for vertically intra-predicted blocks. Overall, the proposed method shows an average 1.2% reduction in BD-rate, relative to HEVC, with negligible computational complexity.