Fast Mode Decision Using Inter-View and Inter-Component Correlations for Multiview Depth Video Coding

With the development of three-dimensional (3-D) display technologies, 3-D video has attracted more and more interest. Multiview video plus depth (MVD) is one of the most popular representation formats of 3-D video. In MVD coding system, multiview depth video needs to be coded and transmitted in addition to the texture video. This paper presents a novel fast mode decision (FMD) method for odd views in multiview depth video coding. First, the inter-view and inter-component coding correlations are analyzed to provide efficient reference information. Then, with a view to the characteristics of different types of frames, different early termination strategies are proposed. For the nonanchor frame, the early termination criterion is based on the rate-distortion cost information of the even views and the coded block pattern information. For the anchor frame, the criterion is set stricter to maintain the coding accuracy. Experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce 78.07% coding time on average, without significant loss of video quality.