Block structure reuse for multi-rate high efficiency video coding

Adaptive HTTP streaming requires a video to be encoded at multiple independently decodable bitrates. Encoding of multiple bitrates is a complex and time consuming process, especially with the new video coding standard HEVC. In this paper, we analyze the relation of HEVC block structures across encodings of a video at different bitrates. We propose a multi-rate encoding method for HEVC to decrease the overall encoding complexity while keeping the rate-distortion performance as high as possible. Experimental results show an average encoding time decrease of 27% compared to the reference HEVC encoder without degrading the rate-distortion performance.