Impact of packet losses in scalable 3D holoscopic video coding

Abstract

Holoscopic imaging became a prospective glassless 3D technology to provide more natural 3D viewing experiences to the end user. Additionally, holoscopic systems also allow new post-production degrees of freedom, such as controlling the plane of focus or the viewing angle presented to the user. However, to successfully introduce this technology into the consumer market, a display scalable coding approach is essential to achieve backward compatibility with legacy 2D and 3D displays. Moreover, to effectively transmit 3D holoscopic content over error-prone networks, e.g., wireless networks or the Internet, error resilience techniques are required to mitigate the impact of data impairments in the user quality perception. Therefore, it is essential to deeply understand the impact of packet losses in terms of decoding video quality for the specific case of 3D holoscopic content, notably when a scalable approach is used. In this context, this paper studies the impact of packet losses when using a three-layer display scalable 3D holoscopic video coding architecture previously proposed, where each layer represents a different level of display scalability (i.e., L0 - 2D, L1 - stereo or multiview, and L2 - full 3D holoscopic). For this, a simple error concealment algorithm is used, which makes use of inter-layer redundancy between multiview and 3D holoscopic content and the inherent correlation of the 3D holoscopic content to estimate lost data. Furthermore, a study of the influence of 2D views generation parameters used in lower layers on the performance of the used error concealment algorithm is also presented.