tioned by poly phase subsampling (PSS) into several
images with a lower resolution called subimages (Shi-
rani et al., 2001; Gallant et al., 2001; Kazemi, 2012).
Each description is encoded separately and sent to the
receiver. Two types of decoders, called the central de-
coder and the side decoder, are utilized by receiver to
decode the received data stream. Based on availability
of the descriptions in the receiver, the central or side
decoder decodes the received video descriptions. If
decoder receives all descriptions, the central decoder
decodes the received data stream; otherwise, the side
decoder will be used, however it may produce some
distortion. The central decoder combines all descrip-
tions and reconstructs original image but side decoder
tries to interpolate image using available descriptions.
Although, the central decoder provides a better qual-
ity of resolution, the side decoder can provide a bet-
ter quality of experience if current rate is not enough
to support all descriptions or transmission channel is
so noisy that some descriptions may receive unsuc-
cessfully. Such advantage is achieved at the expense
of compression efficiency because pixel subsampling
deteriorates pixel correlation and also each descrip-
tion must have its header data. This means some re-
dundancy can be added without any advantage to im-
prove side quality.
It is worth of mentioning that with a simple spa-
tial MDC, there is no precise adjustment tools over re-
dundancy to control side quality(Shirani et al., 2001;
Gallant et al., 2001; Kazemi, 2012). This means that
there is no way to increase redundancy specifically to
improve resistivity against noise. For example, it is
impossible to make three, six, or seven symmetric de-
scriptions.
To improve MDC performance, Tillo and Olmo
introduced a new MDC algorithm called ”least pre-
dictable vector directional multiple descriptions cod-
ing”(Tillo and Olmo, 2007). This approach basically
copies the least predictable part of the frame in all
descriptions. The simulation result shows that this
method improves side quality compared to previous
simple PSS approach although the new method pro-
vides more redundancy. They also argued that this
algorithm is more complex as it needs to detect least
predictable data.
In another work, Shirani presented a non-linear
PSS approach and analysed its performance in case of
missing one or more descriptions (Shirani, 2006). Ac-
cording to Shirani’s work, some pixels (called region
of interest (ROI)) are sampled with greater rate than
those are not important based on an exponential equa-
tion. On the other hand, descriptions include more
information regarding the ROI and this enhances the
side quality in the side decoder. Since the human vi-
sionary system is more sensitive to objects rather than
pixels, this method can provide better performance
in point of subjective assessment, significantly. Al-
though, this method provides a better subjective eval-
uation, his paper hasnot discussed how to obtain the
ROI. This problem is more sensible for applications
involving with fast video content.
To extend the MDC algorithm for 3D video, it
also needs to apply MDC approach to the depth map
image. Clearly, the depth map image mainly con-
tains depth information of scene objects. Because of
the nature of real objects, depth information of 3D
scenes rarely contain high frequency contents. Hence
depth information can be compressed effectively and
consequently bandwidth and disk space will be saved
much more comparedto dual camera capturing (Fehn,
2004; Hewage, 2014). In another research done by
Karim et al. (Karim et al., 2008), a new MDC algo-
rithm has been introduced for 3D video. They carried
out their experiments using color plus depth map im-
age representation. To save bandwidth, they showed
that the down sampled version of depth map image
is enough for an acceptable reconstruction in the de-
coder. To this end, they used a down sampled version
of depth map image in their investigation on scalable
video coding. They compared the quality of the re-
constructed 3D videos using the original depth map
image and the down sampled version of the depth map
image and concluded that decimation of the depth
map image does not cause a considerable degrada-
tion in the decoded 3D video. They also checked the
result for a scalable multiple description coding ap-
proach and observe the same result. Therefore, down
sampling of the depth map image does not affect the
quality of reconstructed image and this is because, the
depth map image rarely includes high frequency con-
tents and also the depth values of adjacent pixels are
usually similar. This fact that the depth values of pix-
els for an object are very closed to each other has been
used in the research, done by Liu et al. (Liu et al.,
2015), and the variance of the depth values are uti-
lized to do ”texture block partitioning”.
This paper combines the facts used by Tillo
and Olmo (Tillo and Olmo, 2007), Shirani (Shirani,
2006), Karim et al. (Karim et al., 2008), and Liu et al.
(Liu et al., 2015) and introduce a new MDC method
for 3D videos. More explanation about the proposed
method will be provided in the next section.
3 PROPOSED METHOD
This section describes the proposed method for 3D
video multiple description coding. Figure 1 shows an