Merge mode based fast inter prediction for HEVC

The latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) obtains 50% bit rate reduction than H.264/AVC standard with comparable quality, but at the cost of high computational complexity. Inter prediction accounts for large complexity and merge mode is one of the most important new features introduced in HEVC. To address this issue, this paper utilizes the merge mode to accelerate inter prediction by three fast mode decision methods. 1) A merge candidate decision is proposed to select the best merge mode by Sum of Absolute Transformed Difference (SATD) cost to reduce the merge time. 2) An early merge termination is presented still based on SATD cost with more than 90% accuracy. 3) Based on efficient merge mode, symmetric motion partition (SMP) modes can be disabled for non-8 × 8 code units (CUs). Experimental results demonstrate that our work can achieve 53.1%-54.2% time reduction on average with 1.57%-2.30% BD-rate increment. Besides, our method achieves an improvement of 18%-30% time reduction with 0.89%-2.85% BD-rate increment when combined with other existing approaches.