Contents I. Introduction
With the advances in broadcasting technology, terrestrial 3DTV broadcasting services are expected to be popular in the near future. Actually, the experimental broadcasting for 3DTV services with HD quality has recently been started over the existing terrestrial DTV broadcasting systems [1], [2]. Some problems, however, arise in deploying terrestrial 3DTV broadcasting services over the legacy DTV broadcasting systems, which include a backward compatibility problem with the existing 2-D HDTV service and a bandwidth allocation problem. Both MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC video standard are currently used for the 2-D HDTV services in many countries [3]–[5]. One single 2-D HDTV program is transmitted in one frequency band of 6 MHz in Advanced Television Standards Committee (ATSC) standard [6] and 8 MHz in EBU standard [7] for terrestrial TV broadcasting. For stereoscopic 3DTV services with an HD quality, it is not possible to accommodate into the same frequency band the additional MPEG-2 video streams for the other view sequences in a similar HD quality. Fig. 1 illustrates the examples of bitrate allocations in one single 6-MHz channel for 2-D HDTV and in-band stereoscopic 3DTV services over traditional terrestrial broadcasting systems. In Fig. 1(a), a 2-D HDTV program is transmitted in one single frequency band of 6 MHz that maximally allows for 19.39-Mb/s transmission rate where an MPEG-2 video stream takes about a data rate of 17–18 Mb/s [3]. Fig. 1(b) shows an in-band delivery scenario of dual video bitstreams in a same frequency band, in which one is an MPEG-2 video stream (generally used for encoding left-view sequences) and the other one is an H.264/AVC stream for right-view sequences.
Bitrate allocation examples in one single 6-MHz channel for an 2-D HDTV service and an in-band stereoscopic 3DTV service. (a) Bitrate allocation for 2-D HDTV service. (b) Bitrate allocation for 3DTV service.
