Improved compression efficiency is highly desirable in the transmission of 3D video and its storage. 3D–HEVC achieves higher compression efficiency compared to the simulcast HEVC or disparity-compensated multi-view video coding (MVC). In 3D–HEVC, the mean square error (MSE) is used to measure distortion in the rate distortion optimization process. However, MSE is not a good measure to use for measuring visual quality, as it poorly correlates with human perception. 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). Performance evaluations show that the proposed approach improves the compression efficiency of 3D–HEVC for multi-view videos by 2.78%.