Complexity and compression efficiency assessment of 3D-HEVC encoder

This paper presents a complexity and compression efficiency assessment of the 3D-High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC) encoder. An experimental evaluation was carried out to identify the encoding tools with the highest impact on the computational complexity of 3D-HEVC. The evaluated tools were firstly divided into three categories: HEVC, multiview, and depth maps tools. Thus, incremental analyses with a set of 28 encoder configurations were performed to point out the compression efficiency and the computational complexity of each encoding tool individually. Experimental results demonstrated different compression-complexity operation points for the 3D-HTM reference software, providing relevant information for the implementation of 3D-HEVC encoders with different tradeoff possibilities between compression efficiency and complexity. The obtained results also allowed identifying encoding tools that can be further optimized in future works.