Loss resilient multi-view video streaming over multiple transmission paths

Abstract

The multi-view video streaming is one of promising technologies for emerging video services. For those applications of multi-view video streaming, video frames of all viewpoints, i.e., cameras, are needed to be transmitted to viewers because the demands of all the viewers' view-switching are unpredictable. However, existing transmission schemes are highly vulnerable to frame loss. Specifically, the frame loss in one viewpoint induces a collapse of decoding for other viewpoint videos. To improve loss-resilience, we propose a multi-path based multi-view video transmission. Our scheme encodes video frames into multiple descriptions that are mutually independent of each other, by using inter-view prediction. It then transmits each description using multiple transmission paths. Our scheme makes three contributions:1) it reduces video traffic even for a large number of cameras, 2) it prevents an increase in the number of undecoded video frames caused by one frame loss, and 3) it conceals frame loss by using the video frames in the other paths. Our scheme generalizes to an arbitrary number of transmission paths and discusses the detailed performance at the number of the paths of 2. Evaluations show that our proposed scheme improves video quality by 3 dB compared to existing transmission schemes in loss-prone environments.