A new fast algorithm based on SATD for HEVC intra prediction

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) has higher computational complexity than the former standard H.264 because the emerging quadtree coding structure not only offers flexibility but also introduces heavy burden. Considering the relevance of sum of absolute Hadamard transformed difference (SATD) to the texture characteristics of blocks, we propose a new fast algorithm based on SATD to alleviate the heavy burden on a coding unit for fast intra prediction in HEVC. In the proposed scheme, we select SATDs of the first several units as references to analyze the early pruning and early splitting thresholds, and we renew those thresholds during an early CU size determination test. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can save encoding time by 44% on average with only 0.9% BD rate increment compared with the reference software HM16.7.