Fast Heuristic for VVC Intra-frame Prediction Targeting 360° Video Formats
Rogério Rosado, Otávio Santos, Franklin Oliveira, Lucas F. M. da Silva, Vanessa Aldrighi, Iago Storch, Gustavo Sanchez, Daniel Palomino, Luciano Volcan Agostini · 2025
Immersive multimedia technologies have gained popularity in recent years, and among them, omnidirectional or 360° videos are popular for entertainment and education purposes. But this video content requires a lot of information to be represented, imposing the use of highly efficient video encoders to make this technology useful. Video coding is known for being a burdensome task, and the recent Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard introduced multiple encoding tools that pushed this complexity issue even further. In addition to that, the larger resolutions required to represent 360° videos only increase the encoding workload. This work aims to reduce this encoding cost challenge by proposing a heuristic for fast intra-frame prediction of 360° videos with minimal coding efficiency penalties. The proposed heuristic exploits the texture distortion caused by the equirectangular projection to discard less relevant partition blocks and encoding tools, reducing the encoding time by 8.27% with a coding efficiency loss of only 0.34% BD-BR. Compared to related works, the proposed method obtains the best trade-off between coding efficiency and encoding time reduction.