Transmission distortion modeling for view synthesis prediction based 3-D video streaming

View synthesis prediction (VSP) is an important tool for improving the coding efficiency in the next generation three-dimensional (3-D) video systems. However, VSP will result in a new type of inter-view error propagation when the multi-view video plus depth (MVD) data are transmitted over the lossy networks. In this paper, this new type of error propagation is characterized and modeled. Firstly, a new analytic model is formulated to estimate the expected transmission distortion caused by error propagation from the synthesized reference view. Then, the compound impact of the transmission distortions of both the texture video and the depth map on the quality of the synthetic reference view is mathematically analysed. Our extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed transmission distortion model is very accurate.