Edge skip intra coding method for depth coding

An efficient intra coding method is presented for depth coding, namely edge skip. In the proposed method, the depth edge macro-block (MB) is skipped without coding. At the decoder side, the edge MB is reconstructed with the reference samples of the adjacent left and above lines, and the associated partitioning information. The partitioning information is derived from the co-located area in the corresponding reconstructed texture image by a k-means clustering. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the coding efficiency both objectively and subjectively.