Fast depth map intra-mode selection for 3D-HEVC intra-coding

Abstract

As the last effort of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T Video Coding Experts Group for 3D video coding, high-efficiency video coding (HEVC)-based 3D video coding (3D-HEVC) is the new international emerging standard to compress multi-view texture videos plus depth maps data. In the test model of 3D-HEVC, the conventional HEVC intra-prediction modes and new additional intra-coding tools called depth modeling modes (DMMs) are exploited for depth map intra-coding. These intra-modes provide important coding improvement. However, the improvement of the coding efficiency is obtained at the expense of a computational complexity increase, which obstructs 3D-HEVC from practical real-world applications. Previously, we propose a depth map intra-model decision using tensor features as homogeneity determination. In this paper, we propose an amelioration of the previously proposed depth map intra-model decision using an efficient homogeneity determination. In most cases, the angular intra-coding and DMM could be skipped if some specific conditions are satisfied. The experimental results show that the proposed intra-model decision can reduce the encoding time significantly, with negligible loss of rate distortion performance.