Low Complexity H.265/HEVC Coding Unit Size Decision for a Videoconferencing System

With the development of Internet and video capture techniques, videoconferencing becomes still more popular. However, with the increased size of the video resolution, the volume of the raw videoconferencing video data increases dramatically. The H.265/HEVC video compression standard can efficiently compresses the videoconferencing video, while the high compression rate is at the cost of heavy encoding complexity. Hence, reducing the complexity is vital to be used for the H.265/HEVC encoder in videoconferencing systems. In this paper we proposed a low complexity H.265/HEVC coding unit size decision algorithm for a videoconferencing system, by considering the coding content property of the coding unit, in which the coding unit size decision process is terminated if the prediction residuals of the coding unit are all transformed and quantized to zeroes. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves 62.79% on average in encoding time saving, while the rate distortion degradation is acceptable.