Region-Based Multiple Description Coding for Multiview Video Plus Depth Video

Interframe and interview predictions are widely employed in multiview video coding. This technique improves the coding efficiency, but it also increases the vulnerability of the coded bitstream. Thus, one packet loss will affect many subsequent frames in the same view and probably in other referenced views. To address this problem, a region-based multiple description coding scheme is proposed for robust 3-D video communication in this paper, in which two descriptions are formed by setting the left and right view as dominant in the first and second description, respectively. This approach exploits the fact that most regions in the reference view could be synthesized from the base view. Hence, these regions could be skipped or only coarsely encoded. In our work, the disoccluded regions, illumination-affected regions, and remaining regions are first determined and extracted. By assigning different quantization parameters for these three different regions according to the network status, an efficient multiple description scheme is formed. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves considerably better performance compared with the traditional approach.