Optimal Representations for Adaptive Streaming in Interactive Multiview Video Systems

Interactive multiview video streaming (IMVS) services permit to remotely navigate within a 3D scene with an immersive experience. This is possible by transmitting a set of reference camera views (anchor views), which are used by the clients to freely navigate in the scene and possibly synthesize additional viewpoints of interest. From a networking perspective, the big challenge in IMVS systems is to deliver to each client the best set of anchor views that maximizes the navigation quality, minimizes the view-switching delay and yet satisfies the network constraints. Integrating adaptive streaming solutions in free-viewpoint systems offers a promising solution to deploy IMVS in large and heterogeneous scenarios, as long as the multiview video representations on the server are properly selected. Therefore, we propose to optimize the multiview data at the server by minimizing the overall resource requirements while offering a good navigation quality to the different users. We propose a representation set optimization problem for multiview adaptive streaming systems, and we show that it is NP-hard. Therefore, we introduce the concept of multiview navigation segment that permits to cast the video representation set selection as an integer linear programming problem with a bounded computational complexity. We then show that the proposed solution reduces the computational complexity, while preserving optimality in most of the 3D scenes. We finally provide simulation results for different classes of users and show the gain offered by an optimal multiview video representation selection compared to recommended representation sets (e.g., Netflix and Apple ones) or to a baseline representation selection algorithm, where the encoding parameters are decided a priori for all the camera views.