Visual Media Coding and Transmission

3.5 Conclusions

In this chapter, contributions relating to scalable video coding have been described in the framework of VISNET. Virtual collaboration videoconferencing is one of the applications and scenarios presented. Advances of scalable video coding for 3D video applications were discussed in the three categories given below.

First, a highly-scalable 2D-model-based video coding technique was investigated and its application for depth map sequence coding was also studied. The objective of scalable coding of shape, texture, and depth for 3D video is to improve the coding efficiency of 3D video content. Some algorithms have been proposed for scalable shape coding, scalable texture coding, and scalable depth coding. Promising results have been obtained. Extensive experiments have been conducted to verify the efficiency of our proposed method for both texture and depth coding, and to compare it with the standard coding tools such as MPEG-4 and H.264.

Second, the adaptation of scalable video coding for stereoscopic 3D video applications were also presented. The work analyzed the rate-distortion performance of stereoscopic video using three configurations based on MPEG-4 MAC, H.264/AVC, and SVC. The proposed SVC configuration, based on the layered architecture, performs similarly to the configuration based on H.264/AVC and outperforms the configuration based on MPEG-4 MAC at all bit rates in terms of objective and subjective quality. Furthermore, the configuration based on SVC produces ...