University of Southern Queensland Faculty of Engineering & Surveying ERROR RESILIENCE TECHNIQUES FOR WIRELESS 3 - D VIDEO TRANSMISSION

Three-dimensional (3-D) video has only recently become a buzzword. It offers a high quality and immersive multimedia experience on consumer electronic platforms. The year 2009 was a seminal year for 3-D video with the first successful film Avatar illustrated its use to a wide audience. As a result of advances in capturing, signal processing, transmission, and display technologies, both industry and academia are now focused on delivering 3-D media to home systems and to mobile devices. Wireless transmission of 3-D video content is expected to be the next big revolution in consumer multimedia applications. It faces many challenges in the processing chain from capture to display. Because of these challenges, this thesis investigates and presents a number of novel techniques for error resilience 3-D video transmission. Four error resilience techniques for 3-D video transmission over wireless networks were proposed. The recent H.264/AVC standard and the video-plus-depth 3-D video format were adopted to assist in implementing these techniques. The proposed methods could also be applied to other video coding standards and to different 3-D video formats. This thesis begins by investigating the standard error resilience source coding of H.246/AVC I-frame and of JPLW for still image transmission. Standard error resilience techniques are reviewed and compared. The experimental results show that H.264/AVC is much more robust in reducing transmission errors than JPWL. The second part of the thesis proposes a new hierarchical 16-Quadrature amplitude modulation (QAM) based unequal error protection (UEP) scheme for ii 3-D video with depth image based rendering (DIBR). The video-plus-depth format is partitioned into two sequences, i.e., a color sequence and a depth sequence, according to their respective importance to the overall quality of the 3-D video. In this approach, the highly important color sequence is better protected with the most significant bits (MSBs) of 16-QAM, while the less important depth sequence uses the less significant bits (LSBs). The third part of the thesis investigates the use of cooperative diversity to enhance the performance of high data rate communication over wireless fading channels. Although cooperative diversity has received much research attention recently, it has not yet been investigated in the context of unique characteristics of 3-D video transmission. In this part, the performance of a cooperative 3-D video system, with amplify-and-forward (AF) relaying, for UEP 3-D video transmission through best relay selection is investigated. In particular, closed-form expressions for outage probability and bit error probability (BEP) were developed. The results of the BEP, outage probability, and peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) were presented to demonstrate the proposed UEP scheme in terms of the received quality of 3-D video. Finally, for more efficient 3-D video transmission, relay selection and hierarchical quadrature amplitude modulation (HQAM) were joined because they help address the problems of diversity and robustness. This part is concerned with the use of hybrid relay networks and HQAM for improved UEP transmission of color-plusdepth 3-D representation. Hybrid relay selection along with HQAM was proposed as a method to overcome the decreases in video quality of high SNR values when HQAM was used alone. It has the advantages of both techniques at different SNR regions. Analytical expressions of the BER and outage probability of the SNR were given in closed-form. The proposed techniques offer the opportunity for significant improvements over the existing techniques for 3-D video transmission. It is expected that these methods will find wide applications in future 3-D video systems and wireless networks such as 4G networks. Dedicated to My very unique and deceased mother, My dear father, and Siblings, My wife, and daughters (Ala, Asel, and Rahaf) Certification of Dissertation I certify that the ideas, designs and experimental work, results, analyses and conclusions set out in this dissertation are entirely my own effort, except where otherwise indicated and acknowledged. I also certify that the work is original and has not been previously submitted for assessment in any other course or institution, except where specifically stated. Khalid Mohamed Alajel W0091575 ...../...../2013 Signature of Candidate Date