High priority intra coding method for depth video coding

Depth video coding is one of the key techniques to realize the three-dimensional (3D) video system. The depth video is spatially high correlated compared to its corresponding color video in general. In this paper, we propose a high priority intra coding method for depth video coding to efficiently reduce the spatial redundancy. The proposed intra mode is designed based on the intra 16×16 mode. It exploits the derived prediction direction from the adjacent neighboring pixels and does not encode any residual data. The proposed intra mode is allowed I slice as well as P and B slices. It is newly defined for I slice as skip mode and replaced with the skip or direct modes for P and B slices. By the experiments on JMVC 8.2, we confirm that the proposed high priority intra mode reduces about 14.63% bit rate compared to JMVC 8.2 at the same rendering quality.