Fast Intra Mode Decision for Depth Map coding in 3D-HEVC Standard

three dimensional- high efficiency video coding (3D-HEVC) is the expanded version of the latest video compression standard, namely high efficiency video coding (HEVC), which is used to compress 3D videos. 3D videos include texture video and depth map. Since the statistical characteristics of depth maps are different from those of texture videos, new tools have been added to the HEVC standard for intra coding. Thirty-five intra prediction modes with the recursive block partitioning structure in HEVC and the depth modeling modes improve the intra coding efficiency while increase the computational complexity. This Standard achieves the highest possible coding efficiency compared with predecessor standards, while increases the computational complexity that makes the 3D-HEVC cannot be suitable for real-time applications. In this paper, a fast intra prediction mode decision method is proposed to code depth map for 3D videos. Since the texture of video and the corresponding depth map represent the same scene, there is a high correlation between the prediction mode of texture video and its depth map. Thus, we can skip some depth map intra prediction modes rarely used in the related texture coding unit. The simulation results show that the proposed method reduces computational complexity by 23.66% compared to 3D-HEVC standard with an increase of 0.09% bit rate