An image feature-based method to efficiently determine inter-coding depth in HEVC

The quad-tree based picture partition scheme in High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) results in a more substantial increase in computational complexity than those incurred by its predecessor video coding standards because of the need in this scheme to determine the best coding unit (CU) partitions. In this paper, we propose a method to effectively reduce the computational complexity of inter-prediction coding in the HEVC standard. The relative displacement of the largest coding unit (LCU) at the corresponding position between adjacent frames is tested through optical flow (motion estimation). The texture intensity of the LCU at the given time is tested if the condition that determines the coding depth in advance cannot be satisfied. The depth of the coding unit (CU) can be determined in advance beyond the xCompressCU function by using our proposed method, which does not require the calculation of the rate-distortion (RD) cost for each level of depth, and thus reduces the circular traversal times of the xCompressCU function. Experimental results proved that our proposed method is effective, as it reduced the computational complexity of an encoder by 53.2% on average, and had a slight influence on coding performance.