As the latest video compression standard,high efficiency video coding (HEVC) ad opts a lot of novel technologies,which can improve the coding performance considerably.However,th e computational complexity of HEVC also increases rapidly,especially the complexity coding tree unit (CTU) str ucture selection in the intra coding,which extends the encoding time seriously.In order to improve the encod ing efficiency of HEVC,we propose a fast coding unit (CU) partitioning decision method for HEVC intra codi ng.In the proposed method,two kinds of CU partitioning structure fast decision algorithms are designed based on optimizing the traverse order in CTU structure selection.The traverse operations in them start from the maximum and minimum de pths of CU partitioning structure respectively,and the early determination technology is also adopted. In addition,by analyzing the texture features of CTU and the coding parameters,the optimal fast decision algorithm c an be selected from the proposed partitioning algorithms to find the optimal CU partitioning structure before che cking every CTU.Based on HM 15.0,we implement the proposed method.The experimental results show that this me thod can decrease the encoding time by 31.14% with minimal loss in coding performance,which means the proposed method can improve the encoding efficiency of HEVC.