Color plus depth 3-D video transmission with hierarchical 16-QAM

The research on three-dimensional (3-D) video transmission over wireless networks has gained rapid growth in the last view years and poses more challenges than the conventional two-dimensional (2-D) video. In color plus depth representation, the 3-D video is synthesized from color and depth map and the reconstructed quality is highly affected by color information rather than the depth one. In this paper, an unequal error protection (UEP) scheme based on hierarchical quadrature amplitude modulation (HQAM) for 3-D video transmission is proposed. The proposed scheme exploits unique characteristics of the color plus depth map stereoscopic video. The UEP scheme assigns more protection to the color sequence than the depth map so as to achieve high quality 3-D video. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed UEP scheme outperforms the conventional equal error protection (EEP) schemes by up to 5 dB in terms of the received left and right views quality.