Fast CU splitting and pruning method based on online learning for intra coding in HEVC

The latest standard of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has a better coding efficiency compared to H.264/AVC. It is reported that the bitrate of the video applied HEVC is the half of video applied H.264/AVC at the same encoding quality. However, the cost of improvement is the increasing computational complexity which is mainly brought by the quadtree based coding tree unit (CTU). In this paper, a fast coding units (CU) splitting and pruning method is proposed to speed up the process of searching the best partition for CTU. Experiment has shown that our method can save 46% computational complexity on average at the cost of increasing Bjontegaard delta rate (BD-rate) by 0.82% when the method is applied to sequences in Class A.