Abstract
While a traditional two-dimensional (2D) video is sufficient for describing details of the scene, three-dimensional (3D) video can provide more realistic representation of the same scene using depth information. With the rapid growth in video compression, communication network, and display technologies, it is believed that 3D video will play a significant role in the fields of media representation and communications in the near future. There are many methods available to provide audiences with 3D experience; however the simplest way to do so is based on the concept of stereopsis, in which two images of the same scene are employed to reproduce the real-world scene. In a modern 3D video transmission system, instead of transmitting two video data streams capturing by left and right cameras, left and right views are generated by utilising a monoscopic video (colour component) and associated per-pixel depth information (depth component). In this thesis, efficient 3D video coding and transmission techniques for colour-plus-depth 3D video have been introduced to improve the performance of 3D video transmission over wireless networks. Both colour and depth components are coded and transmitted in the ways that the quality of 3D reproduction is maximised. To improve the coding efficiency in 3D video coding, special characteristics of depth video and motion correlation between colour and depth data components are taken into account. Finally, a novel rate control algorithm for colour-plus-depth 3D representation is introduced by allocating bits to each data component according to their- relative complexity.