Multiview video plus depth (MVD), which consists of a texture image and its associated depth map, has been introduced as a 3D video format, and 3D video coding, such as 3D-HEVC, was developed to efficiently compress this MVD data. However, this requires high encoding complexity because of the additional depth coding. In particular, intra coding using various prediction modes is very complicated. To reduce the complexity, we propose a fast depth intra mode decision method based on mode analysis. The proposed method adaptively reduces the number of original candidate modes in a mode decision process. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves high performance in terms of the complexity reduction.
Improved depth coding for HEVC focusing on depth edge approximation
