• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.765-780
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision method that determines the coding unit depth for enhancement layers to improve an encoding speed of a scalable video encoder based on HEVC. To decide the coding unit depth of the enhancement layer, firstly, the coding unit depth of the corresponded coding unit in the basement layer is employed. At this stage, the final CU depth is decided by calculating the rate-distortion costs of one lower depth to one upper depth of the referenced depth. The proposed method can reduce a computational load since it does not calculate the rate-distortion costs for all the depths of a target CU. We found that the proposed algorithm decreases encoding complexity of 26% with approximately 1.4% bit increment, compared with the simulcast encoder of the HM 4.0.