Error Concealment Techniques in Multi-view Video Applications

Abstract

The demand for immersive multimedia experiences is driving researchers and industry to develop solutions that capture, deliver, and display 3D video in an efficient way. The key to the success of this technology is the removal of redundant data through effective video coding and its transmission. One solution that can meet this coding requirement is Multi-view Video Coding (MVC). Besides the removal of spatial and temporal redundancies already used in legacy singleview video transmission, this scheme also considers the redundancies present in between views. Such redundancies exist since the different spatially separated capturing devices are shooting the same view. Removal of the latter significantly enhances the coding efficiency compared to encoding separately each view. This huge reduction in data to be transmitted comes at a price. Practical channels are not error-free, and thus, because of the dependencies generated during encoding, errors in the channel will result in artifacts in the video streams that will propagate in space, time, and views until the dependencies are interrupted. This demands solutions that allow the reconstruction of missing data at the receiver to guarantee a good quality of experience (QoE) which is paramount to the success of 3D video applications. To reduce the occurrence of erroneous data, the information transmitted needs to be protected using error control strategies. These will typically introduce some redundancies that infer knowledge on missing information such that it can be recovered. However, not all the erroneous data can be recovered requesting algorithms that can limit and estimate the missing information. The latter techniques are known as error resilience coding and error concealment methods, respectively, in which the error propagation is restricted and the missing content is estimated from the available information. This chapter will examine the effects of errors experienced during transmission of multi-view video content.