A Coding-Efficiency-Aware Fast Heuristic for VVC Intra-Frame Prediction Targeting 360° Videos

360° videos have gained prominence among immersive media, providing users with an impressive immersive scene experience. But the computational effort necessary to encode these videos is very high since the 360º videos demand more data to be represented. This paper presents a heuristic-based decision solution for the intraframe prediction in Versatile Video Coding (VVC) focused on 360º videos. The main goal is to reduce the computational effort of the intra-frame prediction process while ensuring minimal impact on coding efficiency. This is achieved exploring the distortions introduced by the equirectangular projection used to encode 360º videos. The results of the proposed heuristic present time savings of 8.34 % with a minor coding efficiency loss of only 0.16% BD-BR. This loss is the smallest among related works, allowing the proposed solution to achieve the best balance between time savings and coding efficiency losses among works in the literature.