Quality-aware 3D video delivery

Three dimensional (3D) videos are the next natural step in the evolution of digital media technologies. In order to provide viewers with depth perception and immersive experience, 3D video streams contain one or more views and additional information describing the scene's geometry. This greatly increases the bandwidth requirements for 3D video transport. In this thesis, we address the challenges associated with delivering high quality 3D video content to heterogeneous devices over both wired and wireless networks. We focus on three problems: energy-efficient multicast of 3D videos over 4/5G networks, quality-aware HTTP adaptive streaming of free-viewpoint videos, and achieving quality-of-experience (QoE) fairness in free-viewpoint video streaming in mobile networks. In the first problem, multiple 3D videos represented in the two-view-plus-depth format and scalably coded into several substreams are multicast over a broadband wireless network. We show that optimally selecting the substreams to transmit for the multicast sessions is an NP-complete problem and present a polynomial time approximation algorithm to solve it. To maximize the power savings of mobile receivers, we extend the algorithm to efficiently schedule the transmission of the chosen substreams from each video. In the second problem, we present a free-viewpoint video streaming architecture based on state-of-the-art HTTP adaptive streaming protocols. We propose a rate adaptation method for streaming clients based on virtual view quality models, which relate the quality of synthesized views to the qualities of the reference views, to optimize the user's quality-of-experience. We implement the proposed adaptation method in a streaming client and assess its performance. Finally, in the third problem, we propose an efficient radio resource allocation algorithm in mobile wireless networks where multiple free-viewpoint video streaming clients compete for the limited resources. The resulting allocation achieves QoE fairness across the streaming sessions and it reduces quality fluctuations.