A light-weight HEVC encoder for image coding

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), not only provides a much better coding efficiency than previous video coding standards, but also shows significantly superior performance than other image coding schemes when applied to image coding. However, the improvement is at the cost of significant increase of encoding complexity. In this paper, we focus on retaining the high coding efficiency provided by HEVC while largely reducing its encoding complexity for image coding. By applying various techniques including optimized coding structure parameters, coding unit early termination, fast intra prediction and transform skip mode decision, we significantly reduce the complexity of HEVC intra coding while keeping most of its coding efficiency. Experimental results show that our light-weight HEVC encoder can save about 82% coding time compared with original HEVC encoder. With a slight loss to the HEVC reference software, the proposed scheme still gains about 19% in BD-BR compared with H.264/AVC.