Fast CU size decision based on texture complexity for HEVC intra coding

The quad-tree based CU partition scheme is one of the new methods proposed in HEVC to achieve higher encoding efficiency at a cost of high computational complexity. In this paper, we proposed a fast coding unit (CU) size decision algorithm for HEVC intra coding. In our method, the complexity of the current CU and its neighbors are firstly analyzed. Since the neighboring CU usually has similar textures, it is possible to employ the complexity of the neighboring CU as a threshold to skip some useless CU size for the current CU partitioning. Experimental results show that our proposed method can speed up original HEVC intra coding by averagely 23.667% with a negligible drop in encoding performance for different video sequences.