Fast HEVC intra prediction mode decision based on EDGE direction information

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is an emerging standard that achieves higher encoding efficiency when compared to previous standards such as H.264/AVC. One key contributor to this improvement is the new intra prediction method that supports a large number of prediction directions at a cost of very high computational complexity. This paper presents a fast intra prediction mode decision algorithm, which instead of taking into account only the modes of the neighbor PUs (prediction units) uses edge information of the current PU to choose a reduced set of directions from which the best prediction mode (direction) is finally selected. The proposed method provides a decrease of up to 32.08% in the HEVC intra prediction processing time, with a little increase in the bit-rate (0.9% on average) and a negligible reduction in PSNR values.