Reusable HEVC design in 3D-HEVC

This paper proposes a reusable design for the merging process used in three-dimensional High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC), which can significantly reduce the implementation complexity by eliminating duplicated module redundancies. The majority of inter-prediction coding tools used in 3D-HEVC are utilized through a merge mode, whose extended merging process is based on built-in integration to completely wrap around the HEVC merging process. Consequently, the implementation complexity is unavoidably very high. To facilitate easy market implementation, the design of a legacy codec should be reused in an extended codec if possible. The proposed 3D-HEVC merging process is divided into the base merging process of reusing HEVC modules and reprocessing process of refining the existing processes that have been newly introduced or modified for 3D-HEVC. To create a reusable design, the causal and mutual dependencies between the newly added modules for 3DHEVC and the reused HEVC modules are eliminated, and the ineffective methods are simplified. In an application of the proposed reusable design, the duplicated reimplementation of HEVC modules, which account for 50.7% of the 3D-HEVC merging process, can be eliminated while maintaining the same coding efficiency. The proposed method has been adopted as a normative coding tool in the 3D-HEVC international standard.