A method and apparatus for low-latency illumination compensation in a three-dimensional (3D) and multi-view coding system are disclosed. According to the present invention, the encoder determines whether to enable or disable the illumination compensation for the current picture or slice based on a condition related to statistic associated with a selected reference picture or slice respectively, or related to high-level coding information associated with the current picture or slice respectively. The high-level coding information associated with the current picture or slice excludes any information related to pixel values of the current picture or slice respectively. The illumination compensation is them applied according to the decision made by the encoder. A similar low-latency method is also applied for depth lookup table (DLT) based coding.