  The next-generation Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard introduces a new
Multi-Type Tree (MTT) block partitioning structure that supports Binary-Tree
(BT) and Ternary-Tree (TT) splits in both vertical and horizontal directions.
This new approach leads to five possible splits at each block depth and thereby
improves the coding efficiency of VVC over that of the preceding High
Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard, which only supports Quad-Tree (QT)
partitioning with a single split per block depth. However, MTT also has brought
a considerable impact on encoder computational complexity. In this paper, a
two-stage learning-based technique is proposed to tackle the complexity
overhead of MTT in VVC intra encoders. In our scheme, the input block is first
processed by a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict its spatial
features through a vector of probabilities describing the partition at each 4x4
edge. Subsequently, a Decision Tree (DT) model leverages this vector of spatial
features to predict the most likely splits at each block. Finally, based on
this prediction, only the N most likely splits are processed by the
Rate-Distortion (RD) process of the encoder. In order to train our CNN and DT
models on a wide range of image contents, we also propose a public VVC frame
partitioning dataset based on existing image dataset encoded with the VVC
reference software encoder. Our proposal relying on the top-3 configuration
reaches 46.6% complexity reduction for a negligible bitrate increase of 0.86%.
A top-2 configuration enables a higher complexity reduction of 69.8% for 2.57%
bitrate loss. These results emphasis a better trade-off between VTM intra
coding efficiency and complexity reduction compared to the state-of-the-art
solutions.
