Fast CU Partition Decision Algorithm for AVS3 Based on Frequency Domain

The third generation of Audio Video coding Standard (AVS3) is an emerging video coding standard that surpasses High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). AVS3 allows flexible block subdivision to achieve great coding performance by applying Quad- Tree (QT), Binary-Tree (BT) and Extend Quad-Tree (EQT) partition structure, while the increased flexibility comes at the cost of enormous computational complexity. In this paper, we present a novel fast partition algorithm for all coding units (CUs) based on Discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients in frequency domain, which can also obtain the image texture features like Spatial domain and guide to skip horizontal/vertical BT/EQT partition of CUs or early terminate the partition of flat CUs. Experimental results show that the proposed fast CU partition algorithm achieves about a 26 % encoding time reduction on average with only a 0.45 % Bjantegaard Delta Bit Rate (BDBR) increase for the AVS3 reference software HPM 14.0 under All-Intra configuration.