Review and evaluation of VVC fast partitioning search methods using a common baseline

An important new tool in Versatile Video Coding (VVC) is the extended block partitioning scheme. It enables recursive block subdivisions with five different split modes. This flexibility largely contributes to VVC's compression performance, but also increases the encoder complexity. There have been many methods proposed in the literature to speed up the partitioning search in VVC encoders, from simple heuristics to complex approaches based on neural networks. This paper intends to review this literature and compare it to a simple complexity reduction technique, namely progressive reduction of available split-depths. For each reviewed paper, a working point is found that roughly matches either the shown runtime reduction or bitrate increase. Our proposed method produces a variety of working points with its convex hull including the operating points of many approaches discussed in the literature. Only half of the reviewed works slightly outperform the envelope of proposed working points. This review and performance evaluation study intends to put into perspective known VVC encoder optimization research from literature when compared to our proposed common baseline method that may serve as a benchmark for future work in this area.