In order to improve the coding efficiency of the I frame of depth maps,a macro- block (MB) mode skip coding method is proposed.This method fully considers the features of the depth map,namely,large flat areas and strong correlation among the modes of spatial adjacent MBs in the flat areas.On this basis,the modes of spatial ad-jacent coded MBs are used to predict the current MB mode,and the current MB mode coding is skipped when the predicted mode is equal to the current MB mode.Moreover,an intra MB skip coding method is put forward,which can skip both the MB mode and the quantized residual coefficients of the MBs in the flat areas and can reduce the involved redundancy in the process of coding the coefficients.The two proposed methods have no effect on the qua-lity of the reconstructed frame because they are adopted in the MB coding stage after the MB mode decision.Experi-mental results show that the two proposed methods bring about bit- rate reduction respectively by 7.83% and 8.93%.