Fast encoder implementation in high efficiency video coding (H.265/HEVC)

The rapid development and increase of multimedia applications, as well as the demand for higher video-quality services at restricted resources like storage capacity, transmission bandwidth and power consumption, has brought the urgent need for more efficient video compression techniques. The emerging video coding standard which has recently standardized as High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/ HEVC) has a significant superiority over its predecessor, Advanced Video Coding (AVC/H.264). When compared with AVC, HEVC is reported to halve the bit-rate with the same visual quality, or a better quality with the same bit-rate. Beside other improvements, HEVC significantly gets its power from the use of dynamic hierarchical quad-tree structure by partitioning the frames into smaller regions called coding units (CU), by means of a rate-distortion optimization process (RDO). However, this improvement yields to a dramatic increase of high computational complexity and increased encoding time, which primarily restricts its adaptation in real-time applications. This thesis briefly represents the structure and principles of HEVC and evaluates its outperforming performance against previous video coding standards, including AVC. In our study, an early CU determination algorithm for fast encoder realization is proposed in order to reduce the encoding time which is the most important part of the standard standing for development.