Fast Transform Unit Depth Decision Based on Quantized Coefficients for HEVC

The quad tree structure based Transform Unit (TU) helps high efficiency video coding to improve the coding efficiency. However, the achieved coding efficiency comes at the cost of the increased computational complexity. In this paper, based on the quantizated coefficients of the TU, we propose an early termination for the quad tree structure based TU encoding process. If the quantized coefficients of the luminance components are all zeros, the TU encoding process will be terminated. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves about 55.13% on average TU encoding time saving, while the rate distortion performance degradation is negligible.