Joint video/depth/FEC rate allocation with considering 3D visual saliency for scalable 3D video streaming

For robust video plus depth based 3D video streaming, video, depth and packet-level forward error correction (FEC) can provide many rate combinations with various 3D visual qualities to adapt to the dynamic channel conditions. Video/depth/FEC rate allocation under the channel bandwidth constraint is an important optimization problem for robust 3D video streaming. This paper proposes a joint video/depth/FEC rate allocation method by maximizing the receiver´s 3D visual quality. Through predicting the perceptual 3D visual qualities of the different video/depth/FEC rate combinations, the optimal GOP-level video/depth/FEC rate combination can be found. Further, the selected FEC rates are unequally assigned to different levels of 3D saliency regions within each video/depth frame. The effectiveness of the proposed 3D saliency based joint video/depth/FEC rate allocation method for scalable 3D video streaming is validated by extensive experimental results.