Multi-View 3D Video Multicast for Broadband IP Networks

With the recent emergence of 3D-supported TVs, video service providers now face an opportunity to provide high resolution multi-view 3D videos over IP networks. One simple way to support efficient communications between a video server and multiple clients is to deliver each desired view in a multicast stream. Nevertheless, it is expected that significantly increased bandwidth will be required to support the transmission of all views in multi-view 3D videos. However, the recent emergence of a new video synthesis technique called Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) suggests that multi-view 3D video does not necessarily require the transmission of all views. Therefore, we formulate a new problem, named Multi-view and Multicast Delivery Selection Problem (MMDS), and design an algorithm, called MMDEA, to find the optimal solution. Simulation results manifest that using DIBR can effectively reduce bandwidth consumption by 35% compared to the original multicast delivery scheme.