MUSCADE: Multimedia Scalable 3D for Europe
MUSCADE was an Integrated Project (IP), funded under the European Union FP7 ICT Networked Media research programme, started in January 2010 and ended in June 2013. The consortium consisted of 12 partners from 7 countries in total. The total funding of the project was €11.7M.
The MUSCADE project defined, developed, validated, and evaluated the technological innovations in 3D-TV capturing, data representation, compression, transmission and rendering, and display adaptations required for a technically efficient and commercially successful end-to-end 3D-TV broadcast system. The MUSCADE reference system architecture developed is seen in the illustration.
MUSCADE was the logical successor of the related projects in FP6 and FP7 that had developed important 3D technologies but did not target the 3D-TV system of the future. As MUSCADE partners were involved in those preceding projects, MUSCADE had access to previously developed technologies, giving it the pole position in the global race. The key role of the I-Lab team (the current members of the IDT at Loughborough University in London) within MUSCADE was to lead the 3D Quality of Experience (QoE) work, in the areas of QoE dimensions/KPIs and combining the QoE dimensions to obtain the overall QoE for 3D audio-visual contents.
Moreover, the team contributed towards the achievements of the project by developing and integrating scalable and radio resource efficient multi-view 3D content transmission techniques and test-beds for broadband wireless access networks, such as WiMAX and WLAN. The team also contributed to the spatial audio-related activities, in which a versatile multichannel spatial audio capturing and post-production techniques were developed incorporating ambisonic microphone array, and in which spatial audio codecs were investigated such as MPEG Surround and Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) towards bandwidth-efficient, realistic and scalable audio reproduction.