Fast depth coding techniques using early termination scheme

Depth video coding is a new technique that permits lower storage and transmission bandwidth compared with multi-view video coding (MVC). Therefore, fast depth video coding is necessary to reduce the computation complexity of the encoder for realizing the practical use. This paper proposed a fast encoding algorithm for depth video coding based on early termination scheme using texture and depth video correlation. Based on the observation that the Direct mode and Inter16×16 mode were highly possible to be the optimal mode, the proposed algorithm first computed the rate distortion cost of the Direct mode and compared with an adaptive threshold. If this rate distortion cost was smaller than the adaptive threshold, Direct mode was selected as the optimal mode. Otherwise, our approach proceeded with the early termination scheme and further checked whether the current microblock belonged to the low motion region using motion complexity for excluding impossible modes. Experimental results have shown that our proposed algorithm can significantly reduce encoding time with a negligible loss of coding efficiency of depth video, compared with the original joint multiview video coding encoder.