Is the transmission of depth data always necessary for 3D video streaming?

Abstract

Depth data is of vital importance in the 3D video streaming, which allows the flexible rendering of views at arbitrary viewpoints. Given the importance of the depth data, the Multi-view Video plus Depth (MVD) format has been conventionally used. In the MVD format, the depth data is transmitted along with the texture data. In this work, we argue that the transmission of the depth data is not necessary in cases, when 1) the bandwidth is limited and 2) viewpoint switching is not frequent. We propose that the depth transmission could be replaced by a receiver- side unit that can estimate the depth from the received multi- view videos. This replacement does not only spare the bandwidth dedicated for the transmission of the depth, but also achieves a competitive rate-distortion performance with the MVD method.