Early merge mode decision for depth maps in 3D-HEVC

Abstract

With the introduction of several new coding tools and technology for depth maps in 3D-HEVC, the coding efficiency is improved at the expense of computational complexity. Meanwhile, the inter-view correlation is not considered and used well for depth maps, while it is developed maturely in texture video coding. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an early determination scheme for the best prediction mode of depth maps in dependent views. The proposed algorithm can early determine the Merge mode as the best one and if it is all other candidates would be skipped by taking advantage of the inter-view information and the intermediate RD-cost comparison. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can provide about 22.1% remarkable time reduction with almost no BDBR increased compared with the state-of-the-art algorithm.