As the latest video coding standard, high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) achieves better performance and supports higher resolution compared with the predecessor standard, H.264/advanced video coding (AVC). Intra-coding is an important feature in HEVC standard, which reduces the spatial redundancy significantly, due to the flexible coding structure, and high density of angular prediction modes. However, the improvement on coding efficiency is obtained at the expense of the extraordinary computation complexity. This study presents a novel coding unit (CU) partitioning technique for HEVC. By using a fast texture complexity detection method, which is based on two-dimensional Haar wavelet transform, texture complexity for each CU can be extracted. According to the Haar wavelet coefficients obtained, an early CU splitting termination is proposed to decide whether a CU should be decomposed into four lower dimensions CUs or not. Experimental results demonstrate that the fast CU partition strategy achieves better trade-off between rate-distortion performance and complexity reduction than the previous algorithms. Compared with the reference software HM16.7, the proposed algorithm can lessen the encoding time up to 46.22% on average, with a negligible bit rate increase of 0.45%, and quality losses lower than 0.04 dB, respectively.

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Fast CU partition strategy for HEVC based on Haar wavelet

References

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