This article is part of the series 3DTV: Capture, Transmission, and Display of 3D Video.

Open Access Research Article

Rate-Distortion Optimization for Stereoscopic Video Streaming with Unequal Error Protection

A Serdar Tan1*, Anil Aksay2, Gozde Bozdagi Akar2 and Erdal Arikan1

Author Affiliations

1 Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Bilkent University, 06800 Ankara, Turkey

2 Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Middle East Technical University, 06531 Ankara, Turkey

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EURASIP Journal on Advances in Signal Processing 2009, 2009:632545  doi:10.1155/2009/632545


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://asp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2009/1/632545


Received: 1 October 2007
Revisions received: 7 February 2008
Accepted: 27 March 2008
Published: 6 April 2008

© 2009 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We consider an error-resilient stereoscopic streaming system that uses an H.264-based multiview video codec and a rateless Raptor code for recovery from packet losses. One aim of the present work is to suggest a heuristic methodology for modeling the end-to-end rate-distortion (RD) characteristic of such a system. Another aim is to show how to make use of such a model to optimally select the parameters of the video codec and the Raptor code to minimize the overall distortion. Specifically, the proposed system models the RD curve of video encoder and performance of channel codec to jointly derive the optimal encoder bit rates and unequal error protection (UEP) rates specific to the layered stereoscopic video streaming. We define analytical RD curve modeling for each layer that includes the interdependency of these layers. A heuristic analytical model of the performance of Raptor codes is also defined. Furthermore, the distortion on the stereoscopic video quality caused by packet losses is estimated. Finally, analytical models and estimated single-packet loss distortions are used to minimize the end-to-end distortion and to obtain optimal encoder bit rates and UEP rates. The simulation results clearly demonstrate the significant quality gain against the nonoptimized schemes.

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