3D Visual Communications

1.1 Why 3D Communications?

Thanks to the great advancement of hardware, software, and algorithms in the past decade, our daily life has become a major digital content producer. Nowadays, people can easily share their own pieces of artwork on the network with each other. Furthermore, with the latest development in 3D capturing, signal processing technologies, and display devices, as well as the emergence of 4G wireless networks with very high bandwidth, coverage, and capacity, and many advanced features such as quality of service (QoS), low latency, and high mobility, 3D communication has become an extremely popular topic. It seems that the current trend is closely aligned with the expected roadmap for reality video over wireless, estimated by Japanese wireless industry peers in 2005 (as shown in Figure 1.1), according to which the expected deployment timing of stereo/multi-view/hologram video is around the same time as the 4G wireless networks deployment. Among those 3D video representation formats, the stereoscopic and multi-view 3D videos are more mature and the coding approaches have been standardized in Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) as “video-plus-depth” (V+D) and the Joint Video Team (JVT) Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) standard, respectively. The coding efficiency study shows that coded V+D video only takes about 1.2 times bit rate compared to the monoscopic video (i.e., the traditional 2D video). Clearly, the higher reality requirements would require larger volumes ...