Fast HEVC Intra Mode Decision Based on Edge Detection and SATD Costs Classification

The recent High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard was designed to achieve significantly improved compression performance compared to the widely used H.264/AVC standard. This achievement was motivated by the ever-increasing popularity of high-definition video applications and the emergence of ultra-HD. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of a significant increase in computational complexity for both inter and intra coding. To alleviate this problem, in this paper, we propose a fast intra mode decision method based on improved edge detection, consideration of most relevant modes from neighboring blocks, and classification of SATD costs permitting the elimination of several candidate modes prior to rate distortion optimization (RDO). Experimental results show that the proposed method provides time reduction up to 39.2% and an average 35.6% with negligible quality loss as compared to the HEVC reference implementation HM 15.0.