How to reduce the computational complexity for depth video coding whil e maintaining high rendering quality of synthesized virtual views is still an urgent problem to be solved.In this paper ,a low complexity depth video coding method is proposed based on maximum tolerable depth distortion (MTDD) model.Specifically,the MTDD model is incorporated into the rate-distortion (RD) function.To determine dis tortion measurement for each coding unit (CU),if the depth coding distortion will not lead to noticeable view synthesis distortion,only depth cod ing distortion term is considered in distortion measurement,otherwise,both depth coding distortion and view synthesis distorti on are considered.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly reduce the coding complex ity wh ile without obvious rendering quality degradation or coding bitrate increasemen t.