Hybrid Ultra-Wide Viewing Broadcasting Platform With Reduced Keypoint Redundancy Matching and Robust Blending for Parallax Errors

Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC) 3.0 is a more innovative standardization including Ultra High Definition (UHD) broadcasting and mobile High-Definition (HD) broadcasting. It also includes the deployment of a disaster information alarm function as well as the adoption of All-Internet Protocol (IP) based transmission in terrestrial broadcasting networks. Thus, ATSC enables additional technologies such as hybrid broadcasting services by interworking terrestrial broadcasting and internet networks for bidirectional customized services. In addition, there is a growing interest in wider viewing contents, which provide more immersive contents than existing UHD broadcasting mediums. Wider viewing contents can be acquired by using large field of view (FoV) lenses such as fish-eye lenses or by stitching several sub-images. The images captured by large FoV lenses have heavily curved surface distortions, while the distortion of the stitching-based wider viewing contents caused by the synthesizing process on overlapping regions is lower. Provision of wider viewing contents over the traditional broadcasting service has limitations in terms of bandwidth. However, they can be overcome by using hybrid broadcasting platforms such as ATSC 3.0, which transmits a video sequence over an RF channel and other viewing-angle video sequences through the Internet network, where signalling among those video sequences is required. Therefore, this paper proposes a hybrid broadcasting platform for transmitting multiple video sequences over broadcasting and Internet networks, and stitching them for wider viewing.