A novel distortion model for depth coding in 3D-HEVC

In 3D-HEVC, the latest 3D video coding project of MPEG, the coding mode of depth maps is determined by view synthesis optimization (VSO) which integrates view synthesis distortion into rate distortion optimization (RDO) to improve the compression efficiency and synthesis quality simultaneously. However, it introduces a big burden in coding complexity of depth maps. In this paper, a novel distortion model for depth coding in 3D-HEVC is proposed which estimates the distortion of synthesized views using an adaptive model for different pixel intervals. It outperforms existing depth distortion estimation algorithms by 16.6% BD-BR saving in max and 10.2% BD-BR saving on average. Compared with VSO, it reduces encoding complexity of depth maps by 46.2% with the highest efficiency-complexity performance among existing depth distortion estimation algorithms.