Temporal Prediction Model-Based Fast Inter CU Partition for Versatile Video Coding

Versatile video coding (VVC) adopts an advanced quad-tree plus multi-type tree (QTMT) coding structure to obtain higher compression efficiency, but it comes at the cost of a considerable increase in coding complexity. To effectively reduce the coding complexity of the QTMT-based coding unit (CU) partition, we propose a fast inter CU partition method based on a temporal prediction model, which includes early termination QTMT partition and early skipping multi-type tree (MT) partition. Firstly, according to the position of the current CU, we extract the optimal CU partition information of the position corresponding to the previously coded frames. We then establish a temporal prediction model based on temporal CU partition information to predict the current CU partition. Finally, to reduce the cumulative of errors of the temporal prediction model, we further extract the motion vector difference (MVD) of the CU to determine whether the QTMT partition can be terminated early. The experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the inter coding complexity of VVC by 23.19% on average, while the Bjontegaard delta bit rate (BDBR) is only increased by 0.97% on average under the Random Access (RA) configuration.