Simplified Depth Intra Coding Based on Texture Feature and Spatial Correlation in 3D-HEVC

3D video coding extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC) adopts many high complexity approaches to improve the coding performance of the depth video, which leads to heavy computation. To alleviate the computation burden, a fast intra coding scheme for the depth map coding is proposed based on texture feature and spatial correlation. The coding unit (CU) sizes and intra prediction modes are selected differently due to different depth features. The CU block is divided into smooth block, texture block and edge block by using gray-level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) and sobel operator. Firstly, for CU level, an early termination strategy of CU splitting for smooth CU is proposed to filter out unnecessary coding blocks. Then, for PU level, a fast candidate mode decision method (FCMDM) is proposed to reduce the redundant candidate modes based on PU's types and the prediction mode of neighbor PUs. Finally, a fast wedgelet pattern determination method based on K-Means is explored to reduce the complexity of depth modelling mode 1 (DMM1). Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm achieves an average time reduction of 40.71% for depth intra coding, with negligible drop in encoding quality. The proposed algorithm achieves better the time saving and coding performance compared with the state-of-the-art method.