Early decision of CU splitting, using base view information, for low complexity MV-HEVC

Multi-view video is becoming a new trend in the multimedia industry. Due to large amount of data generated by such videos, efficient compression and fast encoding speed are hot research areas. Recently MV-HEVC, the multi-view extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard has been introduced. It improves the coding efficiency but the encoding complexity has increased. In this paper we propose an early coding unit (CU) splitting decision of the dependent views from the coding tree units (CTUs) depth information of the base view. Maximum depth of the CU (dependent views) is limited to the maximum value of the depths of the eight neighboring CTUs of the co-located CTU in the base view. Experimental results reveal that our proposed technique achieves upto 63.08% reduction in encoding time, when compared with HTM reference software.