Perceptual quality driven 3D video communications.

The ability to provide more exciting, informative and entertaining end-user visual experience has created an enormous interest among the viewers towards 3D content. Whereas traditional 2D video is sufficient for describing details of captured scenes, 3D video can provide more realistic representation of the same scene with the additional value of depth. The success of today's 3D video services requires that the end users meet a satisfactory level of perceptual quality. Thus the main focus of this research is to investigate and design efficient means of delivering the maximum perceptual quality of colour-plus-depth based 3D video services to end-users. 3D content needs to be compressed effectively before transmitting them over communication channels due to the large amount of raw data associated with it. However, compression of 3D content introduces coding artefacts, which hinder the true perception of 3D video. In the first part of the thesis, a novel perceptual quality based rate-controlling algorithm is proposed for both 3D and 2D video encoding, by considering the perceptual quality of video sequence. The proposed technique shows better performance and can be effectively used in off-line video coding. Although several quality models have been proposed in literature to assess the quality of 2D video, no similar effort has been taken for the quality assessment of 3D video. In the second part of the thesis, a compound 3D quality model is designed by combining dominant perceptual attributes of 3D video. While subjective test results remain the best and precise judgment of 3D video quality, the use of proposed quality model is an acceptable compromise for the 3D video research community to speed up the development of 3D consumer products, services and applications. Effective transmission schemes are necessary to improve the end-user perceptual quality and transmission reliability in 3D video communications. Highly compressed 3D content are very sensitive to channel errors. To improve the performance of 3D video transmission over bandwidth limited and error prone wireless channels, a perceptual quality based Joint Source Channel Coding (JSCC) approach is proposed to minimize the effect of both source and channel distortions in the final part of the thesis. Key words: 3D video communications, Colour-plus-depth 3D video. Perceptual 3D video quality Rate controlling, 3D video transmission and Joint Source Channel Coding (JSCC)