Fast partitioning algorithm for HEVC Intra frame coding using machine learning

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the new video coding standard recently approved by ISO and ITU. HEVC allows a bit rate reduction greater than a 50% with respect to its predecessor, the H.264/AVC, offering the same perceptual quality, by means of a set of new tools that have been introduced. Compared with the current state of the art in image coding, such as JPEG, JPEG2000 or the new JPEG XR, the new Intra Frame coding performs a high compression process in the "All-Intra" mode. All these improvements are at expense of a high computational cost, making it considerably difficult to implement in real time. Hence, this paper presents a mechanism that can be used by the RDO algorithm to select the optimal coding block size for Intra-Prediction, by using a data mining classifier, based on a previous training. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a 30% of Time Savings over a wide range of high resolution sequences (Class A, B and F), with a negligible loss of coding efficiency.