A fast CU encoding scheme based on the joint constraint of best and second-best PU modes for HEVC inter coding

The emerging video coding standard High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has shown greatly improved coding efficiency by adopting hierarchical structures of coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU), and transform unit (TU). However, the encoding time increases substantially due to the numerous combinations of CU, PU and TU. In this paper, we propose a fast CU encoding scheme for HEVC inter coding based on the joint constraint of best PU mode, the second-best PU mode as well as the CBF information. The experimental results show that the proposed fast CU encoding scheme can reduce the encoding time by more than 35% for RA and LB cases with negligible BD-rate loss over HEVC test model reference software, HM 16.4.