Multi-strategy depth intra mode decision algorithm in 3D-HEVC

Abstract

The new generation of 3D video coding standard, denoted as 3D High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC), uses Multi-view Video Plus Depth (MVD) format to represent stereo videos. Due to the reason that the fringe information of depth maps has great influence on the video quality of synthesized views, Depth Modeling Modes (DMMs) are introduced to maintain the quality of depth maps, while causing computational complexity increase tremendously. Therefore, a multi-strategy depth intra mode decision algorithm is proposed in this paper. It incorporates early rough mode decision (RMD) termination strategy, candidate mode reduction strategy and fast DMM decision strategy. The experimental results indicate that the proposed algorithm can obtain an average encoding time reduction of 34.38% for depth map coding, with just 0.43% BDBR increase.