A fast CU partitioning algorithm in HEVC inter prediction for HD/UHD video

The emerging high efficient video coding (HEVC) standard adopts quad-tree structure to partition the coding unit (CU) which is flexible and efficient. However, it causes enormous computational complexity. In this paper, a fast CU partitioning algorithm in the inter prediction of HEVC is proposed. Firstly, based on the visual saliency map detection, a fast CU partitioning depth prediction algorithm is proposed to alleviate inter prediction complexity. Furthermore, an early termination algorithm based on the coding bits of CU is presented to reduce the unnecessary partitioning modes. Experimental results show that our proposed fast CU partitioning method reduces the computational complexity of the current HM to about 56.27% in encoding time with 2.568% increase in BD rate for HD/UHD Video.