Early Termination of Block Vector Search for Fast Encoding of HEVC Screen Content Coding

Abstract

This paper proposes an early termination method of a block vector search for fast encoding of high efficiency video coding (HEVC) screen content coding (SCC). In the proposed algorithm, two blocks indicated by two block vector predictors (BVPs) were first employed as an intra block copy (IBC) search. If the sum of absolute difference (SAD) value of the block is less than a threshold defined empirically, an IBC BV search is terminated early. The initial threshold for early termination is derived by statistical analysis and it can be modified adaptively based on a quantization parameter (QP). The proposed algorithm is evaluated on SCM-2.0 under all intra (AI) coding configurations. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm reduces IBC BV search time by 29.23% on average while the average BD-rate loss is 0.41% under the HEVC SCC common test conditions (CTC).