RESEARCH ARTICLE Fast Coding Unit Encoding Mechanism for Low Complexity Video Coding Yuan Gao1,2,3☯, Pengyu Liu1,2,3☯, Yueying Wu1,2,3, Kebin Jia1,2,3*, Guandong Gao1,2,3 1 Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Future Internet Technology, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China, 2 Beijing Laboratory of Advanced Information Networks, Beijing, China, 3 College of Electronic Information and Control Engineering, Beijing University of Technology, Beijing, China ☯ These authors contributed equally to this work. *
[email protected] Abstract In high efficiency video coding (HEVC), coding tree contributes to excellent compression performance. However, coding tree brings extremely high computational complexity. Inno- vative works for improving coding tree to further reduce encoding time are stated in this OPEN ACCESS paper. A novel low complexity coding tree mechanism is proposed for HEVC fast coding Citation: Gao Y, Liu P, Wu Y, Jia K, Gao G (2016) unit (CU) encoding. Firstly, this paper makes an in-depth study of the relationship among Fast Coding Unit Encoding Mechanism for Low CU distribution, quantization parameter (QP) and content change (CC). Secondly, a CU Complexity Video Coding. PLoS ONE 11(3): coding tree probability model is proposed for modeling and predicting CU distribution. Even- e0151689. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0151689 tually, a CU coding tree probability update is proposed, aiming to address probabilistic Editor: You Yang, Huazhong University of Science model distortion problems caused by CC. Experimental results show that the proposed low and Technology, CHINA complexity CU coding tree mechanism significantly reduces encoding time by 27% for lossy Received: September 23, 2015 coding and 42% for visually lossless coding and lossless coding.