Keypoint-based Fast CU Depth Decision for HEVC Intra Coding

The High Efficiency Video Coding (MPEG-H HEVC/ITU-T H.265) is the newest video coding standard which has the quadtree-structured coding unit (CU). The quadtree-structure splits a CU adaptively, and its optimum CU depth can be determined by rate-distortion optimization. Such HEVC encoding requires very high computational complexity for CU depth decision. Motivated that the blob detection, which is a well-known algorithm in computer vision, detects keypoints in pictures and decision of CU depth needs to consider high frequency energy distribution, in this paper, we propose to utilize these keypoints for fast CU depth decision. Experimental results show that 20% encoding time can be saved with only slightly increasing BDBR by 0.45% on all intra case.