Robust Multiview Three-Dimensional Video Communications Based on Distributed Video Coding

Abstract

With the rapid development of electronic and communications technology, multiview video services are becoming more and more feasible in practice. However, robustly delivering many views over error-prone channels is a rather challenging task. Due to the recent development of distributed video coding, this paper proposes two alternative error-resilient schemes for multiview video transmission based on the Wyner–Ziv (WZ) coding technique. A lightweight-encoder error-resilient scheme requires no communications between the cameras at the encoder, whereas the temporal and interview redundancy can be explored to generate the side information at the decoder. In this case, it is not only robust to channel losses but also has independent encoders with low encoding complexity. On the other hand, a complex-encoder error-resilient scheme refers to the scheme that employs an auxiliary redundant stream encoded according to a WZ video coding approach to protect a primary stream encoded with a standard multiview video coding codec. At the receiver, the error-concealed reconstructed frames are used as the side information by the WZ decoder. Therefore, this method maintains the original multiview bitstream unaltered by simply adding WZ bits for protection. Experimental results conducted over a simulated error-prone channel reveal that the two proposed schemes have better performance than the forward error correction by means of the Reed–Solomon and intrarefresh approaches.