Segment-based view synthesis optimization scheme in 3D-HEVC

•A fast view synthesis optimization algorithm is proposed for SVDC in 3D-HEVC.•It can be integrated into both of the block and line based early skip techniques.•It skips line segments of pixels which may not affect synthesized view quality.•The segments are obtained based on information from textures and depth maps.•The line segments are skipped with variable lengths.

The 3D extension of high efficiency video coding (3D-HEVC) adopts a view synthesis optimization (VSO) technique to improve the quality of synthesized views for depth map coding. The exact synthesized view distortion change (SVDC) is calculated in VSO which in turn brings huge coding complexity to the 3D-HEVC encoder due to the real view synthesis process. This work presents a scheme aimed at reducing coding complexity of the SVDC calculating process in the 3D-HEVC encoder. It skips line segments of pixels with variable lengths based on information from both of the textures and depth maps in the SVDC calculation. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can reduce the coding complexity without any significant loss in rate distortion performance for the synthesized views.