Interactive multi-view video delivery with view-point tracking and fast stream switching

Abstract

We present a 3-D Multi-view video delivery system where each user receives only the streams required for rendering their viewpoint. This paper proposes a novel method to alleviate adverse effects of the unavoidable delay between the time a client requests a new stream and the time it becomes available. To this effect, lower bit-rate versions of a set of adjacent views are also streamed to the viewer in addition to the currently required views. This ensures that the viewer has a low quality version of a view ready and decodable when an unpredicted viewpoint change occurs until the high quality stream arrives. Bandwidth implications and PSNR improvements are reported for various low quality streams encoded at different bit-rates. Performance comparisons of the proposed system with respect to transmitting all views using MVC and only two views with no low quality neighbors are presented.