Multiview Video Transmission Over Underwater Acoustic Path

Abstract

Existing studies on multiview video streaming are proposed for terrestrial environments. They can be classified into request-reply and all camera transmission models, while both models suffer from a long switching delay and low video quality in an underwater acoustic path. The implementation of multiview video transmission in an underwater acoustic path requires reduction of the switching delay and the maintenance of high video quality. To this end, we propose a video transmission scheme, namely, Dolphin. Dolphin comprises time-shifted slot assignment, stochastic transmission, correlation-based compensation, and greedy transmission. Dolphin assigns asymmetric and time-shifted transmission slots to an encoder node and a user node according to a propagation delay. Stochastic transmission sends a potential camera's video that will be the most likely to be played back by the user before playback. If the stochastic transmission fails, the video frames of the user's desired camera are encoded with the mispredicted video frames to prevent switching delay from increasing. Moreover, greedy transmission sends all potential video frames, which are potentially displayed by a user, and determines rate allocation of the video frames based on the display probability. Evaluations using Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories' benchmark test sequences demonstrated that Dolphin achieved a short switching delay with a slight degradation in video quality irrespective of communication distance and acoustic path quality. For example, Dolphin decreases the switching delay by 92.7% compared with an existing request-reply model with 0.4-dB quality degradation at a communication distance of 300 m when a user tends to gaze at one camera.