A Fast and Efficient 3D-HEVC Method for Complexity Reduction Based on the Correlations of Inter-View, Spatio-Temporal, and Texture-Depth

3D High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC) is the latest High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard development to improve the compression performance of multi-view video plus depth (MVD) format. It adopts several additional coding tools for better representation of the dependent texture and depth data. These tools achieve high compression efficiency, but require high computational complexity. In this paper, we introduce a fast 3D-HEVC method for the complexity reduction of MVD. A simulation analysis is performed to study the coding information correlations of inter-view, spatio-temporal and texture-depth. The proposed fast algorithm decides to skip some treeblocks of texture and depth map at the early stage without a normal coding process, which includes fast depth level, early SKIP/Merge mode, adaptive early termination, based on the correlations of inter-view, spatio-temporal, and texture-depth. Experimental results show that the proposed fast scheme can save 70.2% encoding runtime of 3D-HEVC, with negligible loss of rate-distortion (RD) performance.