Speed up HEVC encoder by precoding with H.264

Abstract

The new video coding standard, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), was developed to replace H.264/AVC and achieves high efficiency by introducing a new coding structure in adoption of coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU) and transform unit (TU). However, it also imposes great computation burden on the mode decision of encoders. In this paper, a conceptual HEVC encoder architecture with cascaded H.264/AVC encoder is proposed to speed up the CTU splitting process of HEVC encoder. First, the input frame is precoded with an efficient H.264/AVC encoder to gather the partition and prediction information of H.264/AVC macroblocks (MBs). Then based on the gathered information, CU and PU modes are carefully screened during HEVC encoding. Two schemes are proposed to reduce the CU and PU candidate modes to accelerate the Coding Tree Unit (CTU) splitting process. At last, the HEVC encoder tries all combinations of candidate CU and PU mode to determine the optimal CU, PU and TU mode by computing the rate-distortion (R-D) cost. The experimental results on highly-optimized open source codecs - x264 and x265 show that the proposed framework can effectively reduce encoding time with negligible loss in terms of PSNR and bitrate.