Fast intra encoding decisions for high efficiency video coding standard

The high efficiency video coding standard (HEVC) is the next-generation standard developed by the Joint Collaborative Team in Video Coding (JCT-VC). This new standard aims to achieve 50 % bit rate saving with similar objective quality compared to H.264/AVC. A very flexible quadtree coding structure characterized by coding units (CUs), prediction units (PUs) and transform unit (TUs) is adopted by HEVC. However, this structure also introduces great computational complexity on the decision of optimal CU, PU and TU modes. To reduce the intra encoding complexity, we propose a solution which includes fast CU skip decision, fast CU early termination, fast PU mode decision and fast TU size decision. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed solution achieves on average 65 % total encoding time reduction with less than 1.3 % average BD rate increase.