Fast coding unit (CU) determination algorithm for high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) in smart surveillance application

High-efficiency video coding (HEVC) is a successor to the H.264/AVC standard as the newest video-coding standard using a quad-tree structure with the three block types of a coding unit (CU), a prediction unit (PU), and a transform unit (TU). This has become popular to apply to smart surveillance systems, because very high-quality image is needed to analyze and extract more precise features. On standard, the HEVC encoder uses all possible depth levels for determination of the lowest rate-distortion (RD) cost block. The HEVC encoder is more complex than the H.264/AVC standard. An efficient CU determination algorithm is proposed using spatial and temporal information in which 13 neighboring coding tree units (CTUs) are defined. Four CTUs are temporally located in the current CTU and the other nine neighboring CTUs are spatially situated in the current CTU. Based on the analysis of conditional probability values for SKIP and Merge modes, an optimal threshold value was determined for judging SKIP or Merge mode according to the CTU condition and an adaptive weighting factor. When SKIP or Merge modes were detected early, other mode searches were omitted. The proposed algorithm achieved approximately 35 % time saving with random-access configuration and 29 % time reduction with low-delay configuration while maintaining comparable rate-distortion performance, compared with HM 12.0 reference software.