Texture Characteristics Based Fast Coding Unit Partition in HEVC Intra Coding

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is an emerging video compression standard, developed by the Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding (JCT-VC). The aim of HEVC standardization effort is to save about 50% bit rate for equal perceptual video quality relative to H.264/AVC. Although HEVC provides greater bit rate saving, it also brings the enormous encoding complexity increase. In this paper, we propose a fast intra CU decision algorithm based on the texture characteristics of video. Furthermore, we also consider the coding bits of each CU as auxiliary information to refine the partition results. Experimental results show that the fast intra mode decision algorithm provides over 33% complexity reduction in terms of encoding time with negligible quality loss, compared with the original HEVC test model version HM-12.0+RExt-4.0rc2.