Efficient two-stage early SKIP mode termination for depth video coding

Abstract

The video plus depth format has been widely-used in multi-view video systems. Therefore, low complexity depth video coding becomes very essential. For that, an efficient two-stage early SKIP mode termination (TESMT) algorithm is proposed in this paper. First, by using texture-depth correlation, our approach first checks whether current macroblock (MB) is motionless or slow-motion based on motion activity of corresponding region in texture video. If so, SKIP mode is selected as optimal mode and mode decision process is early terminated. Otherwise, our approach further checks whether the rate-distortion cost of SKIP mode is below an adaptive threshold, which is derived by exploiting spatial-temporal correlation between current MB and its adjacent MBs in depth video. Experimental results show that proposed algorithm significantly reduces computational complexity while keeping almost the same coding efficiency of depth video and quality of synthesized view, compared with exhaustive mode decision in multi-view video coding.