Low complexity rate distortion optimization for HEVC

The emerging High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has improved the coding efficiency drastically, and can provide equivalent subjective quality with more than 50% bit rate reduction compared to its predecessor H.264/AVC. As expected, the improvement on coding efficiency is obtained at the expense of more intensive computation complexity. In this paper, based on an overall analysis of computation complexity in HEVC encoder, a low complexity rate distortion optimization (RDO) coding scheme is proposed by reducing the number of available candidates for evaluation in terms of the intra prediction mode decision, reference frame selection and CU splitting. With the proposed scheme, the RDO technique of HEVC can be implemented in a low-complexity way for complexity-constrained encoders. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the original HEVC reference encoder implementation, the proposed algorithms can achieve about 30% reduced encoding time on average with ignorable coding performance degradation (0.8%).