Fast block partitioning method in HEVC Intra coding for UHD video

In this paper, we address the problem of HEVC encoding complexity with Ultra High Definition videos. Block partitioning probabilities given the variance operator are learned off-line and are then used in our low complexity Intra encoder to speed-up the quad-tree construction. Two variants of the partitioning scheme are proposed and experimental results show that the encoding time can be reduced by a factor of 1.9x with no loss of compression efficiency and by a factor of 5.9x with a limited loss of 5%.