Low complexity texture mode decision method for 3D-HEVC

High efficiency video coding (HEVC) based 3D video coding (3D-HEVC) is the latest 3D video coding standard under development. In 3D-HEVC, most of coding units (CU) select merge modes as their best modes. However, they still have to check a large number of irrelevant candidate modes in mode decision process, which brings significant complexity. In this paper, we propose a low complexity texture mode decision method for dependent texture views. First, Coding modes of inter-view reference group and upper-depth CU are used to obtain a coarse combination of merge mode coded CUs in the current frame. Then, skip mode coded CUs are distinguished from merge mode coded CUs in the combination. CUs in the combination only check limited modes in mode decision process according to their determined modes. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can achieve average 11.2% of encoding time saving and 69.4% of complexity reduction with negligible rate distortion performance loss.