Effective coding unit size decision based on motion homogeneity classification for HEVC inter prediction

Determining the best partitioning structure for a given Coding Tree Unit (CTU) is one of the most time consuming operations within the HEVC encoder. The brute force search through quad tree hierarchy has a significant impact on the encoding time especially on high definition (HD) videos. This paper presents a fast coding unit size decision-taking algorithm for inter prediction in HEVC. The proposed algorithm uses a motion homogeneity based classification approach utilizing RD cost as a feature vector. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an average of 73.25% encoding time efficiency improvement with similar rate distortion performance compared to HEVC HM12.0 reference software.