The latest versatile video coding (VVC) introduces some novel techniques such as quadtree with nested multi-type tree (QTMT), multiple transform selection (MTS) and multiple reference line (MRL). These tools improve compression efficiency compared with the previous standard H.265/HEVC, but they suffer from very high computational complexity. One of the most time-consuming parts of VVC intra coding is the coding tree unit (CTU) structure decision. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity multi-type tree (MT) pruning method for VVC intra coding. This method consists of lookahead search and MT pruning. The lookahead search process is performed to derive the approximate rate-distortion (RD) cost of each MT node at depth 2 or 3. Subsequently, the improbable MT nodes are pruned by different strategies under different cost errors. These strategies are designed according to the priority of the node. Experimental results show that the overall proposed algorithm can achieve 47.15% time saving with only 0.93% Bjøntegaard delta bit rate (BDBR) increase over natural scene sequences, and 45.39% time saving with 1.55% BDBR increase over screen content sequences, compared with the VVC reference software VTM 10.0. Such results demonstrate that our method achieves a good trade-off between computational complexity and compression quality compared to recent methods.

Geometric partitioning mode (GPM) is a new inter prediction tool adopted in versatile video coding (VVC), which is the latest video coding of international standard developed by joint video expert team in 2020. Different from the regular inter prediction performed on rectangular blocks, GPM separates a coding block into two regions by the pre-defined 64 types of straight lines, generates inter predicted samples for each separated region, and then blends them to obtain the final inter predicted samples. With this feature, GPM improves the prediction accuracy at the boundary between the foreground and background with different motions. However, GPM has room to further improve the prediction accuracy if the final predicted samples can be generated using not only inter prediction but also intra prediction. In this paper, we propose a GPM with inter and intra prediction to achieve further enhanced compression capability beyond VVC. To maximize the coding performance of the proposed method, we also propose the restriction of the applicable intra prediction mode number and the prohibition of applying the intra prediction to both GPM-separated regions. The experimental results show that the proposed method improves the coding performance gain by the conventional GPM method of VVC by 1.3 times, and provides an additional coding performance gain of 1% bitrate savings in one of the coding structures for low-latency video transmission where the conventional GPM method cannot be utilized.

The emerging Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard currently adopts Triangular Partitioning Mode (TPM) to make more flexible inter prediction. Due to the motion search and motion storage for TPM, the complexity of the encoder and decoder is significantly increased. This letter proposes two simplifications of TPM for reducing the complexity of the current design. One simplification is to reduce the number of combinations of motion vectors for both partitions to be checked. The method gives 4% encoding time decrease with negligible BD-rate loss. Another one is to remove the reference picture remapping process in the motion vector storage of TPM. It reduces the complexity of the encoder and decoder without a BD-rate change for the random-access configuration.