Modeling Acceleration Properties for Flexible INTRA HEVC Complexity Control

Abstract

It is a very well-known fact, that the high complexity of the High Efficiency Video Coding standard (HEVC) is the main hurdle for its wide deployment and use. To tackle this problem, a number of recent research outcomes exploit heuristic algorithms and machine learning, including deep learning, to reduce the coding complexity. However, in most cases, each encoder module, i.e., encoding process, is first accelerated individually, and then different acceleration algorithms are manually combined. Without a holistic strategy, the acceleration potential of multi-module combination is not exploited and the Rate-Distortion (RD) loss is generally not well controlled. To tackle these shortcomings, this paper exploits the acceleration properties of different modules, i.e., the numerical representation of potential time saving and possible RD loss, from which a heuristic model is explored. Then a Heuristic Model Oriented Framework (HMOF) is proposed which adapts the properties of modules to underlying acceleration algorithms. In the framework, two advanced acceleration algorithms, including Border Considered CNN (BC-CNN)-based Coding Unit (CU) partition and Naive Bayes-based Prediction Unit (PU) partition, are proposed for the CU and PU modules, respectively. Further, by leveraging the heuristic model as the guidance to combine the proposed acceleration algorithms, HMOF is globally optimized, where different time saving budgets are wisely allocated to different modules and a theoretically minimal RD loss is achieved. According to the experimental results, through fusing a suitable deep learning technique and a Bayes-Based prediction, the proposed acceleration framework HMOF enable multiple acceleration choices. Here the proposed joint optimization strategy help to make a choice leading to the best cost-performance. Furthermore, within the proposed framework, intra coding time can be precisely controlled with negligible Bjøntegaard delta bit-rate (BDBR) loss. In this context, as a complexity control method, HMOF outperforms the state-of-the-art complexity reduction algorithms under a similar complexity reduction ratio. These results partially demonstrate the superiority of the proposed technique.