Fast rate distortion optimization for the emerging HEVC standard
The under development High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard employs several powerful coding tools to obtain improved compression efficiency regarding the state-of-the-art H.264/AVC standard. To efficiently exploit the temporal and spatial redundancies, HEVC adopts a very flexible quadtree coding structure, allowing the encoder to use a block partition better matching the image features. The best combination of HEVC block partitioning and coding modes is found by means of a rate distortion optimization process. During this minimization, the encoder tests all the possible coding modes and block partitions and keeps those providing the smallest RD cost. Due to the large number of available modes and partitions, the minimization involves extremely high complexity, which may not be suitable for real-time application scenarios. To reduce the complexity, two novel fast RDO techniques are proposed in this paper: Top Skip and Early Termination. The experimental evaluation reveals that the proposed techniques significantly reduce the encoding time, notably up to 45% regarding the high complexity HEVC reference software codec, with a negligible quality loss never larger than 0.1 dB.