Fast coding unit partitioning algorithm for HEVC

The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) will be the next generation video standard, which adopts several new techniques to achieve better coding efficiency compared to the current H.264. One significant progress is the way of coding architecture partitioning. HEVC employs a recursive quadtree to get the best partitioning, which means each 64×64 pixel area is analyzed in different size Coding Units (CU). Due to the large number of available partitions, this new partitioning method greatly increases the encoding time. In this paper, one fast CU partitioning algorithm based on Rate Distortion (RD) threshold to save much encoding time is proposed and the test shows that the average quality loss is less than 0.5%.