Fast motion estimation using priority-based inter-prediction mode decision method in high efficiency video coding

The latest video coding standard, high efficiency video coding (HEVC), is developed to acquire a more efficient coding performance than the previous standard, H.264/AVC. To achieve this coding performance, elaborate coding tools were implemented in HEVC. Although those tools show a higher coding performance than H.264/AVC, the encoding complexity is heavily increased. Especially, motion estimation (ME) requires the most computational complexity because that is always performed on three inter-prediction modes: uni-directional prediction in List 0 (Uni-L0), uni-directional prediction in List 1 (Uni-L1), and bi-prediction (Bi). In this paper, we propose a priority-based inter-prediction mode decision method to reduce the complexity of ME caused by inter-prediction. The proposed method computes the priorities of all inter-prediction modes and decides whether ME is performed or not. Experimental results show that the proposed method reduces the computational complexity of ME up to 55.51% while maintaining similar coding performance compared to HEVC test model (HM) version 10.1.