Online-Learning-Based Complexity Reduction Scheme for 3D-HEVC

3-D High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is a new emerging video compression standard for multiview video applications. This standard utilizes advanced interview prediction characteristics in addition to the prediction features of the HEVC standard for efficient encoding of multiview video content. While using combined features improves the compression performance by utilizing the correlation between the views captured from slightly different angles of the same scene, they also increase coding complexity. The focus of this paper is on developing an efficient complexity reduction scheme for 3D-HEVC, with the intention to facilitate the adoption of this upcoming standard, especially for real-time applications. In this regard, first, we introduce two ways to decrease the complexity of the inter-/ intra-mode search process of the to-be-encoded blocks in the dependent texture views (${\mathrm {DV}}_{t}\text{s}$ ) of 3D-HEVC. Then, we propose a hybrid complexity reduction scheme that utilizes the two-mode prediction approaches, motion information of the base texture view (BVt), and the rate distortion cost of the already encoded blocks in the BVt and DVt. The performance of our proposed scheme is tested for the case with two views (i.e., base view + dependent view). The evaluations confirm that our proposed hybrid complexity reduction scheme reduces the 3D-HEVC codec complexity by 67.70% on average for the DVt compared with the unmodified 3D-HEVC encoder, while maintaining the overall video quality. Compared with the state-of-the-art method, it reduces complexity by 25.74% on average.