Fast inter-prediction algorithm based on motion vector information for high efficiency video coding

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC/H.265) is the latest international video coding standard, which achieves better compression ratio and supports higher resolution than Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC). However, HEVC/H.265 increases the computational burden. To reduce the coding complexity of the HEVC encoder, this paper proposes a fast inter-prediction algorithm to speed up coding time. We collect the average rate-distortion costs (RD-cost) of Skip modes and Merge modes to accelerate prediction unit (PU) mode decisions. In addition, we also acquire and analyze the motion vector range from Merge modes and Inter 2N × 2N modes to decide whether to execute Merge and advanced motion vector prediction (AMVP) of other PUs. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm provides 48.54% time saving on average in random-access configuration and maintains good rate-distortion performance and video quality at the same time. The proposed algorithm also outperforms previous works.