Transport Methods in 3DTV—A Survey

We present a survey of transport methods for 3-D video ranging from early analog 3DTV systems to most recent digital technologies that show promise in designing 3DTV systems of tomorrow. Potential digital transport architectures for 3DTV include the DVB architecture for broadcast and the Internet Protocol (IP) architecture for wired or wireless streaming. There are different multiview representation/compression methods for delivering the 3-D experience, which provide a tradeoff between compression efficiency, random access to views, and ease of rate adaptation, including the "video-plus-depth" compressed representation and various multiview video coding (MVC) options. Commercial activities using these representations in broadcast and IP streaming have emerged, and successful transport of such data has been reported. Motivated by the growing impact of the Internet protocol based media transport technologies, we focus on the ubiquitous Internet as the network infrastructure of choice for future 3DTV systems. Current research issues in unicast and multicast mode multiview video streaming include network protocols such as DCCP and peer-to-peer protocols, effective congestion control, packet loss protection and concealment, video rate adaptation, and network/service scalability. Examples of end-to-end systems for multiview video streaming have been provided.