Traffic and Statistical Multiplexing Characterization of 3D Video Representation Formats (Extended Version)
This work addresses network efficiency for 3D video transport, offering incremental improvements in bandwidth optimization for streaming applications.
The study tackled the challenge of network transport for 3D video by analyzing traffic and multiplexing characteristics of three representation formats, finding that multiview representation achieves the highest bitrate-distortion efficiency but with high variability, and reduces bandwidth requirements for large-scale multiplexing or smoothed traffic.
The network transport of 3D video, which contains two views of a video scene, poses significant challenges due to the increased video data compared to conventional single-view video. Addressing these challenges requires a thorough understanding of the traffic and multiplexing characteristics of the different representation formats of 3D video. We examine the average bitrate-distortion (RD) and bitrate variability-distortion (VD) 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 3D videos in 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.