Traffic and Statistical Multiplexing Characterization of 3-D Video Representation Formats

The network transport of 3-D video, which contains two views of a video scene, poses significant challenges due to the increased video data, compared to a conventional single-view video. Addressing these challenges requires a thorough understanding of the traffic and multiplexing characteristics of the different representation formats of a 3-D video. We examine the average bitrate-distortion (RD) and bitrate variability-distortion characteristics of three main representation formats. Specifically, we compare multiview video (MV) representation and encoding, frame sequential (FS) representation, and side-by-side (SBS) representation, whereby conventional single-view encoding is employed for the FS and SBS representations. Our results for long 3-D videos in the full HD format indicate that the MV representation and encoding achieves the highest RD efficiency, while exhibiting the highest bitrate variabilities. We examine the impact of these bitrate variabilities on network transport through extensive statistical multiplexing simulations. We find that when multiplexing a small number of streams, the MV and FS representations require the same bandwidth. However, when multiplexing a large number of streams or smoothing traffic, the MV representation and encoding reduces the bandwidth requirement relative to the FS representation.