Low calculation cost of HEVC coding unit size based on spatial homogeneity detection.

•Proposition of a fast CU (Coding Unit) size decision method to reduce the HEVC calculation cost based on spatial homogeneity.•Realization of a statistical study, using different video sequences, covering the four angles of the Temporal Information/Spatial Information (TI / SI) plane and for several QP values.•Comparison of proposed approach results with the HM16.13 benchmark test model and results from other recent works.•Experiments of the approach proposed on the different test sequences from the common JCT-VC (Joint Collaborative Team on Video Coding) covering the whole TI/SI plan and for different quality parameters (QP).•Evaluation the impact of the proposed approach on the disparity in terms of SI/TI (Spatial Information/Temporal Information) of the reconstructed video sequences compared to the original video sequences.