Early Skip Decision based on Merge Index of SKIP for HEVC Encoding

The high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard has significantly improved the coding efficiency by adopting a number of new coding tools. However enormous computational complexity is introduced by recursive rate-distortion optimization and new coding tools. In this paper, early SKIP decision method is proposed based on merge index of SKIP. There is high possibility that SKIP is selected as optimal mode when merge index of SKIP is 0. Based on this observation, if merge index of SKIP is 0, SKIP is selected as optimal mode and mode decision process for current CU is early terminated. To increase accuracy of early SKIP decision, we also utilize quantized residual of 2Nx2N_MERGE. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce encoding time by 42.9% on average with negligible RD performance loss (1.0%) under random access condition.