Accelerating HEVC Encoding Using Early-Split

The increase in coding efficiency and complexity of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) over H.264 is due to, among other factors, the time needed to find the optimal partition structure among the more flexible encoding modes for the coding units (CUs) and prediction units (PUs). Although many classification-based algorithms have been proposed to expedite the partition decision, the features that can be acquired from current HEVC encoding order are not sufficient to minimize the loss in coding efficiency. In this letter, we proposed an early-split (ES) order for HEVC CU-level encoding, where the encoder checks the split mode before the nonsquare PU partition modes and utilizes the encoding output of the subCUs to expedite subsequent encoding. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm can save 48% of encoding time on average with only about 0.8% loss in coding performance.

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