Fast and efficient inter CU decision for high efficiency video coding

In this paper, a graph cut based fast Coding Unit (CU) decision algorithm is proposed for HEVC inter frames. Firstly, a feature called pyramid variance of the absolute difference (PVAD) is designed for the CU selection. Secondly, the CU decision is modeled as a Markov Random Field (MRF) inference problem, which can be optimized by the graph cut algorithm. Thirdly, a maximum a posteriori (MAP) approach based on the R-D cost is conducted to evaluate whether the unsplit CUs should be further split or not. Experimental results show the effectiveness of the proposed method.