ERP-Based CTU Splitting Early Termination for Intra Prediction of 360 videos

This work presents an Equirectangular projection (ERP) based Coding Tree Unit (CTU) splitting early termination algorithm for the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) intra prediction of 360-degree videos. The proposed algorithm adaptively employs early termination in the HEVC CTU splitting based on distortion properties of the ERP projection, that generate homogeneous regions at the top and bottom portion of a video frame. Experimental results show an average of 24% time saving with 0.11% coding efficiency loss, significantly reducing the encoding complexity with minor impacts in the encoding efficiency. Besides, solution presents the best results considering the relation between time saving and coding efficiency when compared with all related works.