Solutions for DMM-1 complexity reduction in 3D-HEVC based on gradient calculation

This paper proposes a space exploration over gradient-based algorithms to obtain time savings when applying Depth Modeling Mode (DMM) 1 on 3D High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC) depth maps coding. Four filtering algorithms exploring depth maps characteristics by applying a gradient filter in the depth block borders were evaluated. These filters are applied to detect the best positions to evaluate DMM-1 algorithm, without the use of a semi-brute force approach. Experimental analysis demonstrates that the proposed solutions are capable to achieve time saving results ranging from 4.9% to 8.2%, with a drawback ranging from 0.33% to 1.47% in terms of BD-Rate increase.