Fast Coding Unit Encoding Scheme for HEVC Using Genetic Algorithm.

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) is the newest video codec to increase significantly the coding efficiency of its ancestor H.264/Advance Video Coding with the aids of its new features, such as the quadtree-based coding unit partitioning, a simple deblocking filter, and other advanced coding techniques. However, the HEVC delivers a highly increased computation complexity, which is mainly due to the exhaustive rate distortion optimization search of quadtree-based coding unit partitioning. In this paper, a coding unit partitioning pattern optimization method based on a genetic algorithm is proposed to save the computational complexity of hierarchical quadtree-based coding unit partitioning. The required coding unit partitioning pattern for exhaustive partitioning and the rate distortion cost are efficiently considered as the chromosome and the fitness function of the genetic algorithm, respectively. To reduce the computational time, coding unit partitioning patterns of the key frame are searched and shared to other consecutive frames by taking into account the highly temporal correlation. Our evaluation results show that the proposed method can achieve 62.5% and 16.7% computational complexity reduction on average with a negligible average quality degradation compared with HM16.5 and state-of-the-art support vector machine-based fast algorithm, respectively, under low-delay P configuration with rate control while 64.1% and 15.1% under low-delay configuration with rate control.