Adaptive search range by neighbouring depth intensity weighted sum for HEVC texture coding

High-efficiency video coding (HEVC) outperforms H.264/AVC by providing a bitrate reduction of about 50% while having almost the same perceptual quality. It adopts more flexible partitioning in motion estimation (ME) which gains higher coding efficiency at a cost of increased coding complexity. Depth maps in the emerging multi-view plus depth videos are exploited to adjust the search range in ME for HEVC complexity reduction. With the aid of depth intensity variations among neighbouring blocks, the proposed algorithm derives weights to the neighbouring blocks and establishes an adaptive search range according to the weighted sum of the motion vectors from the neighbouring blocks. Compared with the fast test zone (TZS) search in HEVC, the proposed algorithm saves 65% coding time in ME on average with insignificant rate-distortion degradation.