Context-Based Inter Mode Decision Method for Fast Affine Prediction in Versatile Video Coding

Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the most recent video coding standard developed by Joint Video Experts Team (JVET) that can achieve a bit-rate reduction of 50% with perceptually similar quality compared to the previous method, namely High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). Although VVC can support the significant coding performance, it leads to the tremendous computational complexity of VVC encoder. In particular, VVC has newly adopted an affine motion estimation (AME) method to overcome the limitations of the translational motion model at the expense of higher encoding complexity. In this paper, we proposed a context-based inter mode decision method for fast affine prediction that determines whether the AME is performed or not in the process of rate-distortion (RD) optimization for optimal CU-mode decision. Experimental results showed that the proposed method significantly reduced the encoding complexity of AME up to 33% with unnoticeable coding loss compared to the VVC Test Model (VTM).