Efficient intra Transform Unit partitioning for high efficiency video coding

This paper proposes an efficient method for accelerating Transform Unit (TU) depth decisions based on the rough mode cost (RMC), which is the simplified rate-distortion (RD) cost during the rough mode decision (RMD), in HEVC intra coding. The TU partition of the mode with the minimal RMC is used to determine the TU partitions of remaining intra modes. The proposed TU partitioning method improves RD performance as well as reduces the encoding time; it demonstrates greater performance than the default method in reference software.