Reduced-reference quality metric for 3D depth map transmission

Due to the technological advancement of 3D video technologies and the availability of other supportive services such as high bandwidth communication links, introduction of immersive video services to the mass market is imminent. However, in order to provide better service to demanding customers, the transmission system parameters need to be changed “on the fly”. Measured 3D video quality at the receiver side can be used as feedback information to fine tune the system. However, measuring 3D video quality using Full-reference quality metrics will not be feasible due to the need of original 3D vide sequence at the receiver side. Therefore, this paper proposed a Reduced-reference quality metric for 3D depth map transmission using the extracted edge information. This work is motivated by the fact that the edges and contours of the depth map can represent different depth levels and hence can be used in quality evaluations. Performance of the method is evaluated across a range of Packet Loss Rates (PLRs) and shows acceptable results compared to its counterpart Full-reference quality metric.