A Fast HEVC Inter CU Selection Method Based on Pyramid Motion Divergence

The newly developed HEVC video coding standard can achieve higher compression performance than the previous video coding standards, such as MPEG-4, H.263 and H.264/AVC. However, HEVC´s high computational complexity raises concerns about the computational burden on real-time application. In this paper, a fast pyramid motion divergence (PMD) based CU selection algorithm is presented for HEVC inter prediction. The PMD features are calculated with estimated optical flow of the downsampled frames. Theoretical analysis shows that PMD can be used to help selecting CU size. A k nearest neighboring like method is used to determine the CU splittings. Experimental results show that the fast inter prediction method speeds up the inter coding significantly with negligible loss of the peak signal-to-noise ratio.