A Hardware-Friendly Lightweight Partition Decision Algorithm for VVC Intra and Inter Coding

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard notably enhances encoding efficiency with the Quad-Tree plus Multi-Type Tree (QTMTT) partition structure. However, the complex QTMTT tool presents substantial challenges in both software and hardware implementation. To overcome those challenges, this paper introduces a hardware-friendly partition decision algorithm for VVC intra and inter coding. Firstly, we propose a lightweight backbone network to extract partition-aware features. Secondly, we employ a Quantisation Parameter (QP) fusion network to regulate the impact of QPs on the partition structure. Additionally, we apply a top-down threshold-driven post-processing algorithm, in which improbable partition types are removed to directly derive the unique partition structure. Experiments show that our method not only exceeds the previous state-of-the-art work in BD-BR performance, but also shows sufficient hardware-friendly characteristics. To the best of our knowledge, this work is among the earliest to comprehensively discuss and implement a hardware-friendly partition decision algorithm.