Adaptive early termination mode decision for 3D-HEVC using inter-view and spatio-temporal correlations

3D extension of high efficiency video coding (3D-HEVC) supports the coding of multi-view video and depth map. It adds new coding tools to the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) design, which improve the HEVC compression capabilities for 3D video. These coding tools achieve high coding efficiency, but it brings relatively high computational complexity which limits 3D-HEVC from practical applications. In this paper, we propose an adaptive early termination mode decision algorithm to reduce 3D-HEVC computational complexity. An experimental analysis is performed to study inter-view and spatio-temporal correlations in the coding information. Based on the analysis results, we can determine to skip some specific prediction mode at the early termination stage without a normal 3D-HEVC encoding process. The proposed algorithm uses the correlation between inter-view and spatio-temporal blocks. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce computational complexity of 3D-HEVC encoding while maintaining almost the same rate-distortion (RD) performance.