High-efficiency video coding (HEVC) can greatly improve coding efficiency compared with the prior video coding standard H.264/AVC by adopting advanced hierarchical coding structures such as coding unit (CU), prediction unit (PU), and transform unit. For each CU, an exhaustive mode decision strategy is adopted to achieve the best rate distortion (RD) cost, which simultaneously results in enormous computational complexity. In this paper, an early SKIP mode decision algorithm is proposed for the HEVC encoder to speed up the process of mode decisio...
