Quality evaluation for real-time 3D video services

3D video adds the sensation of depth to conventional video in order to provide better natural viewing conditions for users. However, 3D video communication applications are in its early stage due to limitations of channel bandwidth and to the packet losses and errors due to congestion and bad channel conditions. In order to provide a better service to 3D video users, the compression and transmission system parameters can be changed on the fly. The measured 3D video quality at the receiver-side can be used as feedback information to fine tune the system. This paper proposes a quality evaluation method for real-time transmission of 3D video depth maps associated with colour plus depth based 3D video. The extracted edge information together with luminance and contrast information are employed to evaluate the quality degradation in this method. This work is motivated by the fact that edges and contours of the depth map can represent different depth levels and hence can be used in measuring the structural degradation of 3D depth maps. The performance of the method is evaluated across a range of compression levels and PLRs (Packet Loss Rates) and shows accurate results compared to its counterpart Full-Reference (FR) quality metric.