Current research towards 3D video compression within MPEG requires the compression of three texture and depth views. To reduce the additional complexity and bit rate of the depth map encoding, we present a fast mode decision model based on previously encoded macroblocks of the texture view. Meanwhile we present techniques to reduce the rate based on predicting syntax elements from the corresponding texture view. The proposed system is able to get a reduction in complexity of 71.08% with an average bit rate gain of 4.35%.