Partition Map-Based Fast Block Partitioning for VVC Inter Coding
Journal:
arXiv
Published Date:
Apr 25, 2025
Abstract
Among the new techniques of Versatile Video Coding (VVC), the quadtree with
nested multi-type tree (QT+MTT) block structure yields significant coding gains
by providing more flexible block partitioning patterns. However, the recursive
partition search in the VVC encoder increases the encoder complexity
substantially. To address this issue, we propose a partition map-based
algorithm to pursue fast block partitioning in inter coding. Based on our
previous work on partition map-based methods for intra coding, we analyze the
characteristics of VVC inter coding, and thus improve the partition map by
incorporating an MTT mask for early termination. Next, we develop a neural
network that uses both spatial and temporal features to predict the partition
map. It consists of several special designs including stacked top-down and
bottom-up processing, quantization parameter modulation layers, and
partitioning-adaptive warping. Furthermore, we present a dual-threshold
decision scheme to achieve a fine-grained trade-off between complexity
reduction and rate-distortion (RD) performance loss. The experimental results
demonstrate that the proposed method achieves an average 51.30% encoding time
saving with a 2.12% Bjontegaard Delta Bit Rate (BDBR) under the random access
configuration.
