Hardware-oriented fast mode decision algorithm for intra prediction in HEVC

In this paper, a hardware-oriented low complexity fast intra prediction algorithm is presented. The proposed algorithm adopts a fast Discrete Cross Differences (DCD) to detect the dominate direction of the coding unit. Based on DCD information, only a subset of the 35 candidate modes are selected for the rough mode decision process. Moreover, four simple but efficient early termination strategies are proposed to terminate the RDO process properly. Complexity analysis results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can be easily implemented on hardware platform with fewer resources consumed. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm reduce the encoding time by 66% on average, requiring bit-rate increase about 3.9% and PSNR decrease about 0.18dB, respectively.