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An efficient low-complexity block partition scheme for VVC intra coding

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Abstract

The newest versatile video coding (VVC) adopts a novel quadtree with a nested multi-type tree (QTMT) partition structure for intra-frame coding and splits the coding unit (CU) into not only square sub-blocks but also rectangular sub-blocks. The more flexible CU sizes improve the encoding efficiency while cause much heavier computational complexity than High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). In this paper, an efficient low-complexity CU partition method based on the texture characteristic is proposed to achieve a good trade-off between the coding efficiency and the complexity reduction. Specifically, the texture complexities of vertical and horizontal directions are quantitatively measured in terms of the sum of the mean absolute deviation (SMAD) of the sub-blocks. Then, the vertical and horizontal texture complexities are compared to eliminate some unlikely partition modes. Moreover, the threshold of directional SMAD ratios for choosing the texture direction is adjusted according to the quantization parameter (QP) to improve the prediction accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves the average complexity reduction efficiency by 54.60% than the VVC test model (VTM). The implementation of the proposed method is publicly available at http://sites.google.com/site/wangmiaohui/ and http://github.com/csust-sonie/fastVVC_RTIP_2107.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the Associate Editor and the Anonymous Reviewers for examining this manuscript and for their precious time. This paper was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61772087, 61701310 and 61504013, in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Shenzhen City under Grant 20200805200145001, in part by the State Scholarship Fund of China Scholarship Council under Grant 201808430236, in part by the “Double First-class” International Cooperation and Development Scientific Research Project of Changsha University of Science and Technology under Grants 2018IC23 and 2018IC25, in part by the Natural Science Foundation of Hunan Province under Grants 2016JJ2005 and 2019JJ50648, in part by Scientific Research Foundation of Hunan Provincial Education Department of China under Grants 19B004 and 16B006, and in part by the CERNET Innovation Project under Grant NGII20160203.

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Song, Y., Zeng, B., Wang, M. et al. An efficient low-complexity block partition scheme for VVC intra coding. J Real-Time Image Proc 19, 161–172 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11554-021-01174-z

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