Fast motion estimation algorithm for depth map

The paper presents a fast motion estimation scheme for depth map coding. The distortion measuring process has many redundant operations due to the piece-wise planner property of the depth map. The proposed scheme is designed to reduce those redundant operations by grouping each block into one or two representative values. Then, the entire pixel computations in a block are replaced with a few operations between representative values. As a result, the total number of operations is greatly reduced by 92%, while its impact on the performance is negligible regardless of the searching methods.