Low-complexity depth map compression in HEVC-based 3D video coding

In this paper, a low-complexity algorithm is proposed to reduce the complexity of depth map compression in the high-efficiency video coding (HEVC)-based 3D video coding (3D-HEVC). Since the depth map and the corresponding texture video represent the same scene in a 3D video, there is a high correlation among the coding information from depth map and texture video. An experimental analysis is performed to study depth map and texture video correlation in the coding information such as the motion vector and prediction mode. Based on the correlation, we propose three efficient low-complexity approaches, including early termination mode decision, adaptive search range motion estimation (ME), and fast disparity estimation (DE). Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reduce about 66% computational complexity with negligible rate-distortion (RD) performance loss in comparison with the original 3D-HEVC encoder.