Fast Multi-Type Tree Partition for H.266/VVC Inter Coding

Versatile Video Coding (H.266/VVC), the latest international video coding standard, effectively encodes ultra-high-definition video. Compared to the quadtree (QT) split of High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC), the quadtree with nested multi-type tree (QT-MTT) structure applying binary tree (BT) and ternary tree (TT) coding blocks in H.266/VVC provides various coding unit (CU) partitions. The functionality improves the compression performance but greatly increases encoding complexity. Therefore, the acceleration of encoding is an essential issue. In this paper, the image feature extracted by edge detection is utilized to make fast decisions about the TT split and direction in the MTT structure of CU. Moreover, the maximum partition depth of the coding tree unit is predicted from the reference frames for the early termination of the encoding process. Experimental results demonstrate that the coding time of the proposed algorithm is reduced while the bitrate is well-maintained under random access configuration. The proposed method significantly outperforms the previous work.