Stereoscopic TV over IP

Immersive media content provides a more natural representation of real world information compared to conventional two-dimensional video. In the near future, video applications will be replaced by immersive media with the technological advancements of three-dimensional video capture technologies, efficient multi-view compression algorithms, ever increasing bandwidth of communication links and three-dimensional video display techniques. This paper envisages an application scenario of stereoscopic TV over IP networks. The colour and depth/disparity videos are considered as the main source of stereoscopic video material. Furthermore, this paper proposes a methodology to encode colour and depth video asymmetrically using the layered architecture of the scalable extension of H.264/AVC. The proposed asymmetric coding method achieves high image quality for the rendered left and right videos at low overall bitrates compared to the bitrate requirements of existing IP TV applications. The proposed method can be used to scale existing IP TV applications into stereoscopic TV with a minimum overhead increase while guaranteeing high quality depth perception. Finally the performance of stereoscopic TV content over IP networks is analyzed. This concludes that the image quality of the rendered stereoscopic video over IP can be vastly improved by prioritizing the colour video packets ahead of depth video packets.