A ScalableMultiple Description Scheme for 3D Video Coding Based on the Interlayer Prediction Structure

The most recent literature indicates multiple description coding (MDC) as a promising coding approach to handle the problem of video transmission over unreliable networks with different quality and bandwidth constraints. Furthermore, following recent commercial availability of autostereoscopic 3D displays that allow 3D visual data to be viewed without the use of special headgear or glasses, it is anticipated that the applications of 3D video will increase rapidly in the near future. Moving from the concept of spatial MDC, in this paper we introduce some efficient algorithms to obtain 3D substreams that also exploit some form of scalability. These algorithms are then applied to both coded stereo sequences and to depth image-based rendering (DIBR). In these algorithms, we first generate four 3D subsequences by subsampling, and then two of these subsequences are jointly used to form each of the two descriptions. For each description, one of the original subsequences is predicted from the other one via some scalable algorithms, focusing on the inter layer prediction scheme. The proposed algorithms can be implemented as pre- and postprocessing of the standard H.264/SVC coder that remains fully compatible with any standard coder. The experimental results presented show that these algorithms provide excellent results.