Complexity reduction of depth intra coding for 3D video extension of HEVC

Three dimensional (3D) video technology, systems and applications such as 3D television and freeviewpoint television (FTV) broadcasts require efficient encoding of video information. To fill that need a 3D video extension of High Efficiency Video Coding standard, called 3D-HEVC, is being developed. This extension is based on Multiview Video plus Depth (MVD) format, which associates a depth information to each texture frame of each view. This paper presents a method to accelerate the intra coding of these depth maps to reduce the 3D-HEVC computational complexity. The proposed algorithm exploits the edge orientation of the depth blocks to reduce the number of modes to be evaluated in the intra mode decision. In addition, the correlation between the Planar mode choice and the most probable modes (MPMs) selected is also exploited, to accelerate the depth intra coding. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an average complexity reduction of 15% on depth information encoding, with a small degradation in encoding efficiency (BD-rate increase of 0.16% on average).