Multiple Description Coding of Plane-Based 3-D Surfaces

We present a multiple description coding (MDC) scheme for 3D plane-based surfaces. First, planes are split into two disjoint subsets, called descriptions, each of which provides an equal contribution in 3D surface reconstruction. To optimize the quality of the decoded surface, planes in each description are adaptively compressed according to the channel error condition. Then, the two compressed bitstreams are transmitted over distinct channels to the decoder. At the decoder, if both channels are available, the two bitstreams are decoded and merged together to reconstruct a high quality surface. If only one channel is available, we employ a hole filling method to fill visual holes and reconstruct a smooth 3D surface. Therefore, the proposed algorithm provides an acceptable 3D surface, even when one channel is totally lost.