A New Hierarchical 16-QAM Based UEP Scheme for 3-D Video with Depth Image Based Rendering

Abstract

One of the most important pieces of three-dimensional (3-D) video transmission over wireless channels is the design of error-resilient video transmission. Naturally, many techniques used in two-dimensional (2-D) can be adapted or extended to exploit 3-D video properties. One of those techniques is unequal error protection (UEP) where different parts of 3-D video are protected with different levels of protection. Exploiting the characteristics of 3-D video to provide UEP schemes is not fully investigated. In this chapter, an UEP scheme based on hierarchical quadrature amplitude modulation (HQAM) for 3-D video transmission is proposed. The proposed scheme exploits the unique characteristics of the color plus depth map stereoscopic video where the color sequence has a significant impact on the reconstructed video quality. The UEP scheme assigned more protection to the color sequence than the depth map sequence in order to achieve high quality 3-D video. However, the different levels of protection are assigned through 16-quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM). The color data with high priority (HP) are mapped onto the most significant bits (MSBs) of QAM constellation points and depth map with low priority (LP) is mapped onto the less significant bits (LSBs). Simulation results show that the proposed UEP scheme outperforms the classical equal error protection (EEP) by up to 5 dB gain in terms of the received left and right views quality.