Adaptive CU splitting and pruning method for HEVC intra coding

Coding unit (CU) splitting and pruning for complexity reduction in high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) intra coding is dealt with. Adaptive determination of the threshold values for splitting and pruning in each CU is proposed based on the depth level information of neighbour CUs, whose values are determined from a fixed parameter in the previous method. Simple preconditions for splitting and pruning are also proposed to improve coding efficiency. Simulation results show that the proposed method gives significant improvement of computational complexity with much smaller reduction of coding efficiency compared with the previous method.