Perceptual distortion measurement in the coding unit mode selection for 3D-HEVC
3D-HEVC achieves higher compression efficiency compared with the simulcast HEVC or disparity-compensated multi-view video coding (MVC). Improved compression efficiency is highly desirable in the transmission of 3D video and its storage. The coding efficiency gain is the result of the new coding tools introduced in 3D-HEVC such as inter-view motion prediction and inter-view residual prediction. We propose to integrate a perceptual video quality metric inside the rate distortion optimization process of the 3D-HEVC. Specifically, in the coding unit (CU) mode selection process, PSNR-HVS is used as a measure for distortion. PSNR-HVS is based on the characteristics of the human visual system (HVS). Results show that the proposed approach improves the compression efficiency of the 3D-HEVC and achieves higher video quality compared with 3D-HEVC.