A Fast CU Partition Algorithm for VVenC Encoder in Intra Configuration

Abstract

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) has been recently finalized by the Joint Video Experts Team (JVET). It provides various advanced coding tools, that allow great improvement in coding efficiency by a gain up to 50% in bitrate reduction when compared to the current standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). However, this improvement costs relatively high computational complexity. In this context, this paper focuses on the Quad Tree with nested Multi-Type Tree (QTMTT) partition block in intra prediction mode in VVC. Therefore, a fast Coding Unit (CU) partition algorithm is proposed to directly predict the most probable split mode, ignore remain splits and early terminate CU partitioning process. Thus, our newly designed method is implemented on the Fraunhofer Versatile Video Encoder (VVenC) and tested on the Common Test Conditions (CTC) sequences. The experimental results confirmed that our proposed technique achieves up to 27.02% of encoding time reduction in average, for different test video sequences with a negligible increase in Bjϕntegaard Delta Bitrate (BDBR) of 0.37% as compared to the original VVenC encoder under its All Intra (AI) configuration mode.