Big video data for light-field-based 3D telemedicine

Abstract

Big data and 3D technologies have been successfully leveraged in a variety of industries to improve their efficiency and quality. The healthcare sector has lagged in the uptake of these new technologies. In this article, we propose a novel light field (LF)-based 3D telemedicine system. The proposed system is able to provide a life-like tele-consultation experience that provides a quality of experience far beyond conventional 2D telemedicine systems. In addition, its embedded 3D data in light field video (LFV) format can also facilitate a higher level of big data analysis, so-called big LFV data analysis. To solve the challenges in storage and analysis of LFV, we extend the standard multi-view video coding (MVC) approach to LF-MVC, which is able to achieve up to a 23 percent higher compression rate when compared to standard MVC. Furthermore, a big data analysis framework is proposed to integrate LFV into conventional telemedicine analysis, which can achieve improved classification, statistics gathering, prediction, and cognitive analysis for healthcare applications.