Fast Intra Prediction Mode Decision for High Efficiency Video Coding

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the latest video compression standard for high resolution video content. It is said that HEVC promises the significant compression performance improvement compared to the H.264/AVC. However,it comes with the tremendous encoding complexity increase. It is necessary to decrease the computation complexity of coder. In this paper, after analysis of the coding unit and prediction unit algorithm, a fast mode decision scheme for intra prediction is proposed. This algorithm calculates firstly the texture complexity of coding unit, and set the rational threshold to select the size of coding unit fast; then a modified search process is used to decrease the number for candidate modes of prediction,finally early termination for rate-distortion optimized quantization(RDOQ) is used for Intra prediction. The simulation results showed that,compared with the recent HEVC conference software ,the proposed algorithm can reduce about 40.9% encoding time while suffers from a negligible on bit-rates performance and a negligible average PSNR loss. Keywords-High Efficiency Video Coding; HEVC; coding unit; prediction unit; context complexity; RDOQ