• 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.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.5
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• pp.1825-1839
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• 2015

The final draft of the latest video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), was approved in January 2013. The coding efficiency of HEVC surpasses its predecessor, H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC), by using only half of the bitrate to encode the same sequence with similar quality. However, the complexity of HEVC is sharply increased compared to H.264/AVC. In this paper, a method is proposed to decrease the complexity of intra coding in HEVC. Early pruning and an early splitting strategy are applied to the quadtree structure of coding tree units (CTU) and residual quadtree (RQT). According to our experiment, when our method is applied to sequences from Class A to Class E, the coding time is decreased by 44% at the cost of a 1.08% Bjontegaard delta rate (BD-rate) increase on average.