A Fast CU Partitioning Algorithm Based on Texture Characteristics for VVC

Abstract: Different from the traditional quaternary tree (QT) structure utilized in the previous generation video coding standard H.265/HEVC, a new partition structure named quadtree with nested multi-type tree (QTMT) is applied in the latest codec H.266/VVC. The introduction of QTMT brings in superior encoding performance at the cost of great time-consuming. Therefore, this paper proposes a fast coding unit (CU) partitioning algorithm based on CU texture complexity and texture direction. First, we terminate further splitting of a CU when its texture is judged as simple. Then, we use the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) to extract the texture direction of the block to decide whether to partition this CU by QT, thus terminating further MT partitions. Finally, a final partition type is selected from the four MT partitions in combination with the multi-level texture complexity and texture direction of the block. The simulation results show that the overall algorithm can significantly reduce the encoding time, while the loss of coding efficiency is reasonably low. In comparison with the reference model, the encoding time is reduced by up to 44.71%, while the BDBR is increased by only 0.84% on average.