3D Visual Communications

10.4 3D Video Broadcasting

When considering services that broadcast 3D video content, it is natural to expect that these services will be designed with the constraint of maintaining backwards compatibility with legacy video services that do not provide 3D rendering. As such, this is a consideration that has influenced most of the systems available today for broadcasting 3D video.

On a broad view, broadcasting 3D video involves the capture of 3D video information, its encoding into a usually compressed representation, the transport over a network, and the reception of the 3D video. All of these components have been described throughout this book, so in this section we will focus on describing how they are applied to different system configurations for 3D broadcasting.

The first element of the broadcasting system to look at is the video encoder. Here, the approaches heavily rely on the use of modified MPEG-2 and H.264 codecs. One approach [28] is to encode the left view using a standard MPEG-2 encoding. This part of the video bit stream is considered as a base layer and can be decoded by non-3D video receivers. To provide a 3D video service, the right view is encoded as an enhancement layer and transmitted as a second component of the video stream. In the ATTEST (Advanced Three-Dimensional Television Systems Technologies) project, the encoding of 3D video was done following a video-plus-depth representation using the H.264/AVC codec. Interoperability with legacy systems not capable ...