Fast Coding Unit decision algorithm for depth intra coding in 3D-HEVC

All right reserved. An efficient Coding Unit (CU) decision algorithm is proposed for depth intra coding, in which the depth level of CU is predicted by Corner-Point (CP) and the co-located texture CU. More specially, firstly, the CPs are obtained by corner detector in junction with the quantization parameter, which are further used to pre-allocate the depth level. After that, the refinement of pre-allocation depth level is performed by considering the block partition of the co-located texture. Finally, different depth search range is selected based on the final pre-allocation depth levels. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm can provide about 63% time saving with maintaining coding performance compared with the original 3D-HEVC method. On the other hand, it can achieve about 13% time saving while the BD-rate 3% decreased over the CU decision method that only considers the texture information.