• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.2
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• pp.354-362
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• 2012

Recently, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is under development jointly by MPEG and ITU-T for the next international video coding standard. Compared to the previous standards, HEVC supports variety of splitting units, such as coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU), and transform unit (TU). Among them, it has been known that the recursive quadtree structure of CU can improve the coding efficiency while the encoding complexity is increased significantly. In this paper, a simple conditional probability to predict the early termination condition of recursive unit structure is introduced. The proposed conditional probability is estimated based on Bayes' formula from local statistics of rate-distortion costs in encoder. Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the total encoding time by about 32% according to the test configuration while the coding efficiency loss is 0.4%-0.5%. In addition, the encoding time can be reduced by 50% with 0.9% coding efficiency loss when the proposed method was used jointly with HM4.0 early CU termination algorithm.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.18 no.4
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• pp.631-642
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• 2013

For the emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, a fast transform unit (TU) decision method is proposed. HEVC defines the TU representing a region sharing the same transformation, and it allows a residual block to be split into multiple TUs recursively to form a quadtree. By using the quadtree of TUs, HEVC supports various transform sizes from $4{\times}4$ to $32{\times}32$. The various sizes of TUs can provide a good coding efficiency, whereas this may increase encoding complexity dramatically. In the assumption that a TU with highly compacted energy is unlikely to be split, the proposed method determines TU sizes according to the position of the last non-zero transform coefficient. In the experimental results, the proposed method reduced 18% encoding run time with the negligible coding loss of 0.7% BD-rate for the Random_access case.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.2271-2288
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• 2015

The emerging high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard adopts the quadtree-structured transform unit (TU) in the residual quadtree (RQT) coding. Each TU allows to be split into four equal sub-TUs recursively. The RQT coding is performed for all the possible transform depth levels to achieve the highest coding efficiency, but it requires a very high computational complexity for HEVC encoders. In order to reduce the computational complexity requested by the RQT coding, in this paper, we propose a fast TU size decision method incorporating an adaptive maximum transform depth determination (AMTD) algorithm and a full check skipping - early termination (FCS-ET) algorithm. Because the optimal transform depth level is highly content-dependent, it is not necessary to perform the RQT coding at all transform depth levels. By the AMTD algorithm, the maximum transform depth level is determined for current treeblock to skip those transform depth levels rarely used by its spatially adjacent treeblocks. Additionally, the FCS-ET algorithm is introduced to exploit the correlations of transform depth level between four sub-CUs generated by one coding unit (CU) quadtree partitioning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed overall algorithm significantly reduces on average 21% computational complexity while maintaining almost the same rate distortion (RD) performance as the HEVC test model reference software, HM 13.0.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
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• v.49 no.3
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• pp.40-50
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• 2012

In this paper we propose the fast CU (Coding Unit) mode decision method. To reduce computational complexity and save encoding time of HEVC, we divided CU, PU (Prediction Unit) and TU (Transform Unit) decision process into two stages. In the first stage, because $2N{\times}2N$ PU mode is mostly selected among $2N{\times}2N$, $N{\times}2N$, $2N{\times}N$, $N{\times}N$ PU modes, proposed algorithm uses only $2N{\times}2N$ PU mode deciding depth of each CU in the LCU (Largest CU). And then, proposed method decides exact PU and TU modes at the depth level which is decided in the first stage. In addition, early skip decision rule is applied to the proposed method to obtain more efficient computational complexity reduction. The proposed method reduces computational complexity of the HEVC encoder by simplifying a CU depth decision method. We could obtain about 50% computational complexity reduction in comparison with HM 3.3 HEVC reference software while bitrate compressed by the proposed algorithm increases only 2%.