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Low-Complexity Intra-Coding Scheme for HEVC

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Abstract

Compared with H.264/AVC, the latest video standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) known as H.265 improves the coding efficiency by adopting the quadtree splitting structure which is flexible in representing various textural and structural information in images. However, the computational complexity is dramatically increased, especially in the intra-mode decision process owing to supporting more partitions and modes. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity algorithm for HEVC intra-coding, which consists of a fast coding unit (CU) size decision (FCUSD) method and a fast prediction unit (PU) mode decision (FPUMD) method. In FCUSD, unnecessary CU sizes are skipped early according to the depth level of neighboring CUs and the rate distortion (RD) cost threshold derived from the former coded frame. In FPUMD, the PU mode and RD cost correlations between different depth levels are utilized to terminate unnecessary candidate modes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve about 50.99 % computational complexity reduction on average with 1.18 % BD-rate increase and 0.08 dB BD-psnr loss.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by National Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 61271212, the key project of Science and Technology Commission of Shanghai Municipality under Grant 12511502502 and National High-tech R&D program of China (863 Program, 2015AA015903).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Shanghai University, Shanghai, 200444, People’s Republic of China

    Xiwu Shang, Guozhong Wang, Tao Fan, Yan Li & Yifan Zuo

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  1. Xiwu Shang
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  2. Guozhong Wang
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Correspondence to Xiwu Shang.

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Shang, X., Wang, G., Fan, T. et al. Low-Complexity Intra-Coding Scheme for HEVC. Circuits Syst Signal Process 35, 4331–4349 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00034-016-0264-0

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