High Efficiency Intra CU Partition and Mode Decision Method for VVC

Versatile video coding (VVC/H.266) is the newest video compression standard, which is developed by the Joint Video Experts Team. Compared with previous encoding schemes, VVC achieves higher compression efficiency by introducing a new partition structure and additional intra prediction modes but results in high computational complexity. To efficiently solve this problem of redundant processing in quad-tree with nested multi-type tree structures and intra mode prediction, we propose a texture analysis–based ternary tree (TT) and binary tree (BT) partition strategy, and a gradient-based intra mode decision method to accelerate TT and BT partition and intra mode prediction, separately. The texture complexity and prediction direction of coding unit (CU) is calculated by texture detection method. A texture analysis–based TT and BT partition strategy is established by using the regression method based on analyzing the texture complexity of the CU. Then, a texture analysis–based TT and BT partition strategy is applied to reduce the redundant partition for each CU. By using the prediction direction of CU, a gradient-based intra mode decision method is established for skipping the impossible modes for each CU. Experimental results revealed that the proposed method could save 49.49% in encoding time and increase the Bjontegaard delta bit rate (BDBR) by only 0.56%. It confirms that the proposed method achieved high efficiency and a good balance between the BDBR and time saving.