Fast intra-frame coding algorithm for Versatile Video Coding based on texture feature

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the latest video coding standard. It adopts a quadtree with nested multi-type tree partitioning structure to improve the compression efficiency, but the coding complexity is greatly increased compared with the predecessor standards. In this paper, a texture feature based intra-frame fast algorithm is proposed to reduce the coding complexity of VVC. Firstly, texture thresholds are adaptively set to classify Coding Units (CUs) into simple, common and complex. Partition modes are skipped early for simple CUs and non-partition mode is skipped for complex CUs. Then, by calculating and comparing the directional features for common and complex CUs, the unnecessary direction modes are excluded. Finally, we derive the optimal mode from the remaining partition modes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves 51.72% coding time saving on average, with only a 2.53% Bjøntegaard delta bit rate increase compared to the reference software VTM2.1.