Joint Error Concealment Method for Backward Compatible 3D Video Transmission

When 3D video is transmitted over lossy channels, different strategies can be adopted at the different layers of the communication protocol stack to cope with such errors, in a cross-layer operation framework. At the receiver side, effective error concealment methods are necessary to overcome the quality loss due to erroneous packets. The existing concealment techniques for conventional 2D video can be individually applied for each component/view associated with 3D video. Novel error concealment methods which utilize inherent characteristics of 3D video are also emerging. This paper proposes a colour/texture initiated error concealment method for colour plus depth based 3D video. The error concealment process starts from the colour image sequence as accurate texture information is required to render good quality 2D/3D video with the DIBR (Depth Image-Based-Rendering) method. Since the depth map represents the basic structure of the corresponding colour image, the proposed method utilizes colour image concealment to conceal the errors in the associated depth map as well. This colour/texture image based temporal error concealment method is tested over a backward compatible Scalable Video Coding (SVC) architecture and a simulated packet loss network. The objective and subjective results/illustrations show that improved 2D/3D video quality can be achieved with the proposed method.