Early-Split Based Fast HEVC Encoding

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard achieves 50% improvement incompression efficiency over the widely used H.264/AVC standard at a cost of much higher complexity. The increase in complexity is due to, among other factors, the time needed to findthe optimal partition structure among the more flexible possibilities for the coding units (CUs) and prediction units (PUs). Many classification based algorithms have been proposed to reduce this partition decision time, but the features that can be acquired from current HEVC encoding order may not be sufficient to control the loss in coding efficiency. In this paper, we proposed an Early-Split (ES) order for HEVC encoding, where the encoder checks the split mode before the non-square PU partition modes and utilizes the encoding output of the subCUs to expedite subsequent encoding. Experiments show that the proposed algorithm achieved an average of 48% saving in encoding time with only 0.92% loss in the coding performance.