Adaptive quadtree splitting parallelization (AQSP) algorithm for the VVC standard

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard, also known as H.266, was released in 2020 as the natural successor to the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. Among its innovative coding tools, VVC extended the concept of quadtree (QT) splitting to the multi-type tree (MTT) structure, introducing binary and ternary partitions to enhance HEVC’s coding efficiency. While this brought significant compression improvements, it also resulted in a substantial increase in encoding time, primarily due to VVC’s larger Coding Tree Unit (CTU) size of 128 \(\times \) $\times$ 128 pixels. To mitigate this, this work introduces a flexible parallel approach for the QT traversal and splitting scheme of the VVC encoder, called adaptive quadtree splitting parallelization (AQSP) algorithm. This approach is based on the distribution of coding units (CUs) among different threads using the current depth level of the QT as a basis to minimize the number of broken dependencies. In this way, the algorithm achieves a good trade-off between time savings and coding efficiency. Experimental results show that, when compared with the original VVC encoder, AQSP achieves an acceleration factor of 2.04 \(\times \) $\times$ with 4 threads at the expense of a low impact in terms of BD rate. These outcomes position AQSP competitively in comparison with other state-of-the-art approaches.