HEVC Fast Intra-Mode Selection Using World War II Technique

High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) applies 35 intra modes to every block of a frame and selects the mode that gives the best prediction. This brute-force nature of HEVC makes it complex and unfit for real-time applications. Therefore, a fast intra-mode estimation algorithm is presented here based on the classic World War II (WW2) technique known as the ‘German Tanks Problem’ (GTP). This not only is the first article to use GTP for early estimation of intra mode, but also expedites the estimation process of GTP. Secondly, the various elements of the intra process are efficiently mapped to the elements of GTP estimation. Finally, the two variations of GPT are modeled and are also minimum-variance estimates. These experimental results indicate that proposed GTP-based fast estimation reduced the compression time of HEVC from 23.88% to 31.44%.