Low complexity mode decision for 3D-HEVC.

Qiuwen Zhang,Nana Li,Yong Gan

doi:10.1155/2014/392505

Abstract

High efficiency video coding- (HEVC-) based 3D video coding (3D-HEVC) developed by joint collaborative team on 3D video coding (JCT-3V) for multiview video and depth map is an extension of HEVC standard. In the test model of 3D-HEVC, variable coding unit (CU) size decision and disparity estimation (DE) are introduced to achieve the highest coding efficiency with the cost of very high computational complexity. In this paper, a fast mode decision algorithm based on variable size CU and DE is proposed to reduce 3D-HEVC computational complexity. The basic idea of the method is to utilize the correlations between depth map and motion activity in prediction mode where variable size CU and DE are needed, and only in these regions variable size CU and DE are enabled. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can save about 43% average computational complexity of 3D-HEVC while maintaining almost the same rate-distortion (RD) performance.

Highlights

With the development of the technology of 3D television (3DTV) and free viewpoint television (FTV), 3D video coding attracts more and more attention
In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed fast algorithms, the fast coding unit (CU) size decision and selective disparity estimation algorithms are implemented on the recent 3DHEVC reference software (3DV-HTM 4.1) [18]
The encoder configuration is as follows: there are 3 view cases, the group of pictures (GOP) length is 8 with an intraperiod of 24, HEVC codecs are configured with 8-bit internal processing, the coding treeblock has a fixed size of 64 × 64 pixels and a maximum CU depth level of 4, resulting in a minimum CU size of 8 × 8 pixels, and context-adaptive binary arithmetic coding (CABAC) is used as the entropy coder

Summary

Introduction

With the development of the technology of 3D television (3DTV) and free viewpoint television (FTV), 3D video coding attracts more and more attention. A fast CU splitting and pruning method [12] is presented based on early CU split and pruning decision for HEVC intracoding All these methods are efficient in reducing computational complexity with small degradation in coding performance. To the best of our knowledge, studies devoted to investigation of complexity reduction of the 3D-HEVC are rarely found in the literatures To this end, this paper proposes a fast CU size and DE mode decision algorithm to reduce 3DHEVC computational complexity. The proposed algorithm consists of two approaches: fast CU size decision and selective disparity estimation Based on these two criteria, the number of candidate modes in a view is reduced, the disparity search is selectively enabled, and the search range of CU size is adaptively determined.

Low Complexity Mode Decision Algorithm

Experimental Results

Conclusion