Fast mode decision for HEVC intra coding with efficient mode skipping and improved RMD

HEVC employs a quad-tree based Coding Unit (CU) structure to achieve a significant improvement in coding efficiency compared with previous standards. However, the computational complexity is greatly increased. We proposed a fast mode decision algorithm to reduce intra coding complexity. Firstly, an initial candidate list of intra modes is constructed for each Prediction Unit (PU). The prediction mode correlation between adjacent quad-tree coding levels and between temporal neighbouring frames is used to predict the most likely coding mode. The number of prediction mode that need to be evaluated in residual quad-tree (RQT) process is further reduced by taking the Hadamard cost of prediction mode into consideration. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm saves encoding time by up to 51% compared with the HM 13.0 implementation, while having a negligible impact on rate distortion.