A Fast CU Partition Decision Strategy for AVS3 Intra Coding

Third generation audio and video coding standard (AVS3) is a latest video coding standard developed by China. AVS3 allows flexible coding unit (CU) partition by applying quad-tree (QT), binary tree (BT), and extended quad-tree (EQT) partitioning structures. The increased block partition flexibility brings the significant coding complexity cost. This paper proposes a fast CU partition decision method based on the gradient and the variance for AVS3 intra coding. Experimental results show that the proposed fast algorithm can achieve a good balance between computational complexity and coding performance. Compared with AVS3 software reference HPM4.0, the coding time is reduced by 43%, while the average BD-Rate is only increased by 0.9% in AI (All-Intra) configuration.