Fast CU algorithm and complexity control for HEVC

Abstract

The latest video compression standard HEVC provides the coding unit (CU), defined by quad-tree structures, to achieve high coding efficiency. Compared with previous standards, HEVC encoder increases much computational complexity to levels inappropriate for applications of power-constrained devices. This work thus proposes a fast CU algorithm to improve coding efficiency, and distributes the complexity to the CU layer. Experimental results show that the loss of average BD-PSNR is about 0.1 dB with BD-bitrate 2 % increment as the complexity was reduced to 60%.