3DStreaming: an open-source flexible framework for real-time 3D streaming services

The progress of three-dimensional 3D technologies, together with the wide diffusion of both Internet and broadband technologies, is paving the way to emerging live streaming services which have been conceived for delivering 3D video contents in real-time fashion to end users. Nowadays, the only available tools supporting stereoscopic 3D video services cannot be freely downloaded and require the adoption of owner stereoscopic players. Motivated by the lack of an effective solution, we developed a freeware and open source 3D live streaming framework, namely 3DStreaming. It provides stereoscopic 3D live streaming services over the Internet. In particular, it realizes a complete server implementation, offering the support for any transmission protocol and encoding scheme, as well as the full compatibility with any network architecture (i.e., LAN, MAN, Internet, and so on). At the same time, it allows users to use the preferable stereoscopic player and to render the video through any technique available for the chosen player. The overall performances of the proposed tool have been presented by testing its behavior in several network configurations (i.e., by varying network topology, coding technique, 3D representation format, and average encoding rate). All the measured metrics, which include the number of RTP segments that are transmitted and received, the frame loss ratio, and the PSNR, fully demonstrate the right behavior of the implemented tool in all the considered scenarios. We believe that, thanks to its high flexibility, this tool can be exploited by researchers working on stereoscopic-3D related issues to design, test, and evaluate novel and innovative algorithms, protocols, and network architectures. © 2015, Springer Science+Business Media New York.