The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is an emerging standard that achieves higher encoding efficiency when compared to previous standards such as H.264/AVC. One key contributor to this improvement is the new intra prediction method that supports a large number of prediction directions at a cost of very high computational complexity. This paper presents a fast intra prediction mode decision algorithm, which instead of taking into account only the modes of the neighbor PUs (prediction units) uses edge information of the current PU to choose a reduced set of directions from which the best prediction mode (direction) is finally selected. The proposed method provides a decrease of up to 32.08% in the HEVC intra prediction processing time, with a little increase in the bit-rate (0.9% on average) and a negligible reduction in PSNR values.