A Fast CU Division Algorithm for Intra Prediction in HEVC

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a new video coding standard following H.264/AVC. By introducing a flexible coding unit (CU), which can be recursively divided from 64 64  to 8 8 blocks in a Quadtree-Structure, HEVC achieves significantly higher coding efficiency than the previous standards. With the flexible CU structure, HEVC can effectively adapt to complicated contents with a smaller CU or to flat contents with a larger CU, making it suitable for applications from mobile video to super high definition television (HDTV). On the other hand, CU division does incur high computational cost for HEVC. In this paper, we propose a simple and fast CU division algorithm by using only a subset of pixels to determine when CU division happens. Experiment results show that our algorithm can achieve prediction quality close to HEVC Test Model (HM) with much lower computational cost.