High Quality Multi-view Video Streaming over Multiple Transmission Paths

Abstract

The development of multi-view video has paved the way for emerging 3D applications. In general multi-view video streaming, video frames for all viewpoints, i.e., cameras, must be transmitted to viewers because the view-switching demands of all viewers are unpredictable. However, existing transmission schemes are highly vulnerable to frame loss. Specifically, frame loss in one viewpoint can induce a collapse in decoding for other viewpoints. To improve loss-resilience, this paper proposes a multi-path based multi-view video transmission scheme. Our scheme encodes video frames into multiple versions that are independent of each other, using inter-view prediction. The scheme then transmits each version 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 single-frame loss, and 3) it conceals frame loss by taking video frames from other paths. Evaluations show that our proposed scheme improves video quality by 3 dB, as compared to existing transmission schemes in loss-prone environments.