3D Visual Communications

10.2 Multi-View Video View Switching

The multi-view video application provides an interactive and immersive viewing experience. The viewer can switch their viewpoints and watch the events from different angles for their greatest interest. On the other hand, the required bandwidth to provide such viewing experiences through online streaming is very high. In fact, for the multi-view streaming scenario, a user watches only two views at each time instant and normally these two views will be watched for a certain time duration. As illustrated in Figure 10.2, a user watches view 1 and view 2 at time instance t, and switches to view 2 and view 3 at time instance t + 1. From a bandwidth utilization point of view, it is inefficient to transmit all views to the end user since the user only consumes two views. The bandwidth problem will become worse when there are multiple users requesting multiple view services from one server simultaneously. Although MVC provides an efficient way to compress multiple views into one single bit stream compared to other coding schemes, the required bandwidth is still large. Besides, owing to the inter-view prediction adopted in MVC, the decoding processor needs higher computation complexity and memory access to decode all encoded views but to display only two interested views.

One solution to alleviate the aforementioned bandwidth issue and computation complexity is to encode each view independently (i.e., without exploiting the inter-view prediction) and ...