Prioritized 3D video distribution over IEEE 802.11e

The advancement of 3D video technologies enables us to experience 3D video at home, office and public places. In this paper, a prioritization scheme for backward compatible 3D video distribution over Wireless Local Area Networks (WLANs) is proposed for home/office environments. The scheme is designed to work with the colour plus depth representation format. Colour and depth map sequences have different error sensitivities due to their roles in 3D video rendering. As the colour image sequence is directly viewed by 2D/3D users, its quality influences overall perception more than the depth image sequence. Therefore, the proposed prioritization scheme allocates higher priority for coded colour video stream than for the depth map stream in order to improve the perceived quality of 2D/3D video. The proposed solution is designed for IEEE 802.11e, which supports different traffic classes with various priority levels for improved Quality of Service (QoS). Based on the allocated priorities, 3D data streams are mapped to appropriate medium access classes which differ in terms of packet losses and latency. The objective and subjective quality evaluations show that the proposed scheme improves the quality of 2D/3D video while achieving acceptable 3D depth perception.