Early termination strategy of HEVC based on statistical models

High efficiency video coding(HEVC) uses half of the bitrate compared to H.264/advanced video coding(AVC) for encoding the same sequence with similar quality. Because of the advanced hierarchical structures of coding units(CUs), predicting units(PUs), and transform units(TUs), HEVC can better adapt when encoding full high definition(HD) and ultra high definition(UHD) videos. At the expense of encoding efficiency, the complexity of HEVC sharply increases compared to H.264/AVC, mainly due to its quad-tree structure that splits pictures. In this study, the probability distribution, which is generated by a rate distortion optimizing(RDO) cost, is analyzed. Then, an early terminating method is proposed to decrease the complexity of the HEVC based on probability distributions. The experiment shows that the coding time is reduced by 44.9% for HEVC intra coding, at the cost of a 0.61% increase in the Bj?ntegaard delta rate(BD-rate), on average.