A Study on Feasibility of Dual-Channel 3DTV Service via ATSC-M/H

This paper analyzes the feasibility of a new 3DTV broadcasting service scenario via Advanced Television Systems Committee Mobile/Handheld (ATSC-M/H). We suggest a dual-channel system in which a left-view image is encoded by MPEG-2 with HD quality and a small-sized right-view image is encoded by AVC. Also, the left view is transmitted through ATSC main channel and the right view is transmitted through ATSC-M/H channel. Although the transport stream formats of two channels are different from each other, we demonstrate that it is possible for the ATSC 2.0 decoder to synchronize the display of the left and right views when both encoders use a common wall clock and time stamp. We also propose a program specific information descriptor which guarantees full compatibility with the conventional 2D HDTV and emerging mobile TV services. Finally, we provide the results of subjective visual quality assessment of the proposed system in support of its 3DTV service quality.