Abstract:

Wireless video streaming for multi-view plus depth (MVD) frames enables free viewpoint video on wireless devices, where a viewer can freely synthesize any preferred virtual viewpoint from the received MVD frames. To transmit MVD frames over wireless links, existing schemes use digital-based compression to achieve better compression efficiency. However, the digital-based schemes have an issue called cliff effect, where the video quality is a step function in terms of wireless channel quality. In addition, parameter optimization to allocate quantization levels and transmission power across MVD frames is cumbersome. To facilitate the MVD video streaming, we propose an analog-based transmission scheme. Our scheme directly transmits linear-transformed signals based on five-dimensional discrete cosine transform (5D-DCT), without relying on quantization and entropy coding. The proposed scheme achieves graceful video quality with the improvement of wireless channel quality. In addition, the parameter optimization to achieve highest video quality can be simplified by only controlling transmission power assignment. It is demonstrated with test MVD video sequences that the analog-based scheme offers a great advantage over the conventional digital-based scheme. For instance, the video quality of one intermediate virtual viewpoint is approximately 2.1 dB higher than digital-based schemes at a wireless channel quality, i.e., signal-to-noise ratio (SNR), of 15 dB.