The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard provides a substantial improvement in coding efficiency over previous video coding standards at the cost of a higher computational complexity. HEVC employs a quadtree based image structure by partitioning the image into coding units (CUs). Finding the optimal CU size in terms of rate-distortion is one of the most computationally challenging parts of any HEVC encoder.
In this paper, we present a fast CU size selection method that does not depend on any data from other CUs in the same frame, thus allowing utilization of the high parallel processing capability of many-core processors, such as a GPU. Experimental results show that the proposed method incurs only a negligible loss in rate-distortion performance compared with counterpart methods that limit parallelism.