Fast depth map coding based on virtual view quality

•a VVDE model to estimate the virtual view distortion induced by depth map compression.•a region based QP adjustment scheme to improve the perceived virtual view quality.•a simplified VVDE scheme to improve depth map coding efficiency with low complexity.•a fast CU partition scheme to reduce the depth map coding complexity.

Multi-view video plus depth (MVD) format is a three-dimensional (3D) video representation. The depth map in MVD provides the scene distance information and is used to synthesize the virtual view with texture image through Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR) technique. In this paper, we first present a virtual view distortion estimation (VVDE) scheme to estimate the synthesized virtual view distortion induced by depth map compression. Then based on the synthesized virtual view distortion, we propose region based Quantization Parameter (QP) adjustment scheme to improve the perceived virtual view quality, fast VVDE scheme in depth map coding Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) to improve the coding efficiency and fast Coding Unit (CU) partition scheme to reduce the depth map coding complexity. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can achieve 0.50 dB gain with 47.37% coding time reduction.