Fast Partitioning Decision Scheme for Versatile Video Coding Intra-Frame Prediction

This paper presents a fast partitioning decision scheme for Versatile Video Coding (VVC) intra prediction. VVC adopts the tree coding block structure named Quadtree with nested Multi-Type (QTMT), which significantly improves the coding efficiency at the cost of a high computational effort, limiting its adoption for real applications. Thus, we developed a scheme that encompasses two strategies exploring the features of the current block and the encoding context through the selected intra prediction mode to skip unnecessary evaluations of binary and ternary partitions. Experimental results, obtained with VVC Test Model 5.0 and considering the Common Test Conditions (CTC) under All-Intra (AI) encoder configuration, demonstrated that the proposed scheme achieves 31.41% of coding time saving, on average, with negligible coding efficiency loss.