A fast SAO algorithm based on coding unit partition for HEVC

Sample adaptive offset (SAO) filter algorithm is introduced by HEVC as a completely new stage to improve video quality. It is located after deblocking filter, adding an offset value to each sample based on the reconstructed data and the original YUV. In order to solve the problem of high computational complexity of SAO, a fast S AO algorithm based on coding unit partition is proposed in this paper. Evaluating the texture complexity of coding unit by the depth of block partitioning, and only the complex coding unit performed the S AO filter. Simulation results show that, compared with the HEVC conference software HM9.0, the proposed algorithm can reduce about 44.55% encoding time up to 83.68%, while it suffers from negligible on PS NR performance.