Fast HEVC intra coding decision based on statistical cost and corner detection

As the successor of H.264, High Efficient Video Coding (HEVC) standard includes various novel techniques, including Coding Tree Unit (CTU) structure and additional angular modes used in intra coding. These new techniques promote the coding efficiency on one hand, while increasing the computational complexity significantly on the other hand. In this paper, we propose a fast intra block partitioning algorithm for HEVC to reduce the coding complexity, based on the statistical cost and corner detection algorithm. A block is considered as a multiple gradients region which will be split into multiple small ones, as the corner points are detected inside the block. A block without corner points existing is treated as being non-split when its RD cost is small according the statistics of the previous frames. The proposed fast algorithm achieves nearly 63% encoding time reduction with 3.42%, 2.80%, and 2.53% BD-Rate loss for Y, U, and V components, averagely. The experimental results show that the proposed method is efficient to fast decide the block partitioning in intra coding of HEVC, even though only static parameters are applied to all test sequences.