Complexity reduction for 3D-HEVC depth map coding based on early Skip and early DIS scheme

This paper presents a novel early Skip/DIS mode decision for 3D-HEVC depth encoding which aims at reducing the complexity effort of this process. The proposed solution is based on an adaptive threshold model, which takes into consideration the occurrence rate of both Skip and DIS modes. Occurrence analysis showed that the lower is the Skip and DIS Rate-Distortion cost, the higher is the probability of these modes being chosen. Furthermore, software evaluations showed that the proposed early Skip/DIS scheme is capable of reducing the depth coder complexity in 24.4% for a target hit rate of 99%, and in 33.7% for a target hit rate of 95%, leading to a negligible coding efficiency penalty in both scenarios.