Treffer: Fast Split Depth Range Decision for Texture Coding of Dependent Views in 3D-HEVC

In the 3D-High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC), the basic coding unit (CU) is splitted into four possible quad-tree-structured depth level with the recursive splitting process and ME process. After testing all possible depth levels and prediction modes, the best one with the least rate distortion (RD) cost is used for coding the CU, which requires a very high computational complexity. In this paper, for reducing the coding complexity of 3D-HEVC encoder, we propose a fast depth range decision algorithm for texture coding which decides the depth range with the coded neighboring CU, inter-view corresponding CU and inter-view neighboring CU according to the high correlation between the texture views and its corresponding depth maps. The proposed algorithm makes an early termination of splitting depth levels with the least possibility to further exploit the redundancy between views. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can reduce much computational complexity while maintaining RD performance as the original 3D-HEVC encoder. ; CPCI-S(ISTP) ; zhusiyu621@live.cn; hgqi@ucas.ac.cn; sswang@jdl.ac.cn; swma@pku.edu.cn ; 398-403