Volumetric video is an emerging key technology for immersive representation of 3D spaces and objects. Rendering volumetric video requires lots of computational power which is challenging especially for mobile devices. To mitigate this, we developed a streaming system that renders a 2D view from the volumetric video at a cloud server and streams a 2D video stream to the client. However, such network-based processing increases the motion-to-photon (M2P) latency due to the additional network and processing delays. In order to compensate the added latency, prediction of the future user pose is necessary. We developed a head motion prediction model and investigated its potential to reduce the M2P latency for different look-ahead times. Our results show that the presented model reduces the rendering errors caused by the M2P latency compared to a baseline system in which no prediction is performed.
The rise of capturing systems for objects and scenes in 3D with increased fidelity and immersion has led to the popularity of volumetric video contents that can be seen from any position and angle in 6 degrees of freedom navigation. Such contents need large volumes of data to accurately represent the real world. Thus, novel optimization solutions and delivery systems are needed to enable volumetric video streaming over bandwidth-limited networks. In this chapter, we discuss theoretical approaches to volumetric video streaming optimization, through compression solutions, as well as network and …
Volumetric video is an emerging technology for immersive representation of 3D spaces that captures objects from all directions using multiple cameras and creates a dynamic 3D model of the scene. However, processing volumetric content requires high amounts of processing power and is still a very demanding task for today's mobile devices. To mitigate this, we propose a volumetric video streaming system that offloads the rendering to a powerful cloud/edge server and only sends the rendered 2D view to the client instead of the full volumetric content. We use 6DoF head movement prediction technique…
Volumetric media, popularly known as holograms, need to be delivered to users using both on-demand and live streaming, for new augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) experiences. As in video streaming, hologram streaming must support network adaptivity and fast startup, but must also moderate large bandwidths, multiple simultaneously streaming objects, and frequent user interaction, which requires low delay. In this paper, we introduce the first system to our knowledge designed specifically for streaming volumetric media. The system reduces bandwidth by introducing 3D tiles, and culli…
Volumetric video allows viewers to experience highly-realistic 3D content with six degrees of freedom in mixed reality (MR) environments. Rendering complex volumetric videos can require a prohibitively high amount of computational power for mobile devices. A promising technique to reduce the computational burden on mobile devices is to perform the rendering at a cloud server. However, cloud-based rendering systems suffer from an increased interaction (motion-to-photon) latency that may cause registration errors in MR environments. One way of reducing the effective latency is to predict the vie…
CAGS: Color-Adaptive Volumetric Video Streaming with Dynamic 3D Gaussian Splatting
Simon Fraser University(西蒙弗雷泽大学);Jiangxing Intelligence Inc.(江行智能有限公司);McGill University(麦吉尔大学);Nankai University(南开大学);The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen(香港中文大学(深圳));Fuzhou University(福州大学);Southeast University(东南大学)
Viewport Prediction for Volumetric Video Streaming by Exploring Video Saliency and Trajectory Information
School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology(计算机科学与信息工程学院,合肥工业大学);The University of Electro-Communications(电子通信大学);Aarhus University(奥胡斯大学);School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Hefei University of Technology(电气工程与自动化学院,合肥工业大学);Engineering Technology Research Center of Industrial Automation of Anhui Province(安徽省工业自动化工程技术研究中心);School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology(信息与电子学院,北京理工大学)
School of Electrical Engineering and Automation, Hefei University of Technology, and Engineering Technology Research Center of Industrial Automation Anhui Province, Hefei, Anhui 230009, China(合肥工业大学电气与自动化学院,安徽省工业自动化工程技术研究中心);The University of Electro-Communications, Tokyo, Japan(东京电讯大学);School of Computer Science and Technology, University of Science and Technology of China, Hefei, China(中国科学技术大学计算机科学与技术学院);Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aarhus University, Aarhus, Denmark(哥本哈根大学电子与计算机工程系);Department of Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, University of Missouri–Kansas City, Kansas, USA(密苏里大学- Kansas 城市分校计算机科学与电气工程系);School of Computer Science and Information Engineering, Hefei University of Technology, Hefei, China(合肥工业大学计算机科学与信息工程学院)
To provide a live, active and high-quality virtual touring streaming experience, we propose an unmanned drone stereoscopic streaming paradigm using a control and streaming infrastructure of a 2.4GHz Wi-Fi grid. Our system allows users to actively control the streaming captured by a drone, receive and watch the streaming using a head mount display (HMD); a Wi-Fi grid is deployed across the remote scene with multi-channel support to enable high-bitrate stream- ing broadcast from the drones. The system adopt a joint view adaptation and drone control scheme to enable fast viewer movement including…
Virtual reality (VR) video provides an immersive 360 viewing experience to a user wearing a head-mounted display: as the user rotates his head, correspondingly different fields-of-view (FoV) of the 360 video are rendered for observation. Transmitting the entire 360 video in high quality over bandwidth-constrained networks from server to client for real-time playback is challenging. In this paper we propose a multi-stream switching framework for VR video streaming: the server pre-encodes a set of VR video streams covering different view ranges that account for server-client round trip time (RTT…
The commercialization of Virtual Reality (VR) headsets has made immersive and 360-degree video streaming the subject of intense interest in the industry and research communities. While the basic principles of video streaming are the same, immersive video presents a set of specific challenges that need to be addressed. In this survey, we present the latest developments in the relevant literature on four of the most important ones: (i) omnidirectional video coding and compression, (ii) subjective and objective Quality of Experience (QoE) and the factors that can affect it, (iii) saliency measure…
We propose a robust scheme for streaming 360-degree immersive videos to maximize the quality of experience (QoE). Our streaming approach introduces a holistic analytical framework built upon the formal method of stochastic optimization. We propose a robust algorithm which provides a streaming rate such that the video quality degrades below that rate with very low probability even in presence of uncertain head movement, and bandwidth. It assumes the knowledge of the viewing probability of different portions (tiles) of a panoramic scene. Such probabilities can be easily derived from crowdsourced…
In the 360-degree immersive video, a user only views a part of the entire raw video frame based on her viewing direction. However, today's 360-degree video players always fetch the entire panoramic view regardless of users' head movement, leading to significant bandwidth waste that can be potentially avoided. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive streaming scheme for 360-degree videos. The basic idea is to fetch the invisible portion of a video at the lowest quality based on users' head movement prediction and to adaptively decide the video playback quality for the visible portion based o…
360° video is attracting an increasing amount of attention in the context of Virtual Reality (VR). Owing to its very high-resolution requirements, existing professional streaming services for 360° video suffer from severe drawbacks. This paper introduces a novel end-to-end streaming system from encoding to displaying, to transmit 8K resolution 360° video and to provide an enhanced VR experience using Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). The main contributions of the proposed system are about tiling, integration of the MPEG-Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard, and viewport-aware bitra…
Most of today's mobile devices are equipped with multiple network interfaces and one of the main bandwidth-hungry applications that would benefit from multipath communications is wireless video streaming. However, most of the current transport protocols do not match the requirements of video streaming applications or are not designed to address relevant issues, such as delay constraints, networks heterogeneity, and head-of-line blocking issues. This survey provides a holistic literature review of multipath wireless video streaming, shedding light on the different alternatives from an end-to-en…
We demonstrate an adaptive bandwidth-efficient 360 VR video streaming system based on MPEG-DASH SRD. We extend MPEG-DASH SRD to the 3D space of 360 VR videos, and showcase a dynamic view-aware adaptation technique to tackle the high bandwidth demands of streaming 360 VR videos to wireless VR headsets. We spatially partition the underlying 3D mesh into multiple 3D sub-meshes, and construct an efficient 3D geometry mesh called hexaface sphere to optimally represent tiled 360 VR videos in the 3D space. We then spatially divide the 360 videos into multiple tiles while encoding and packaging, use M…
With increasing advancements in technologies for capturing 360° videos, advances in streaming such videos have become a popular research topic. However, streaming 360° videos require high bandwidth, thus escalating the need for developing optimized streaming algorithms. Researchers have proposed various methods to tackle the problem, considering the network bandwidth or attempt to predict future viewports in advance. However, most of the existing works either (1) do not consider video contents to predict user viewport, or (2) do not adapt to user preferences dynamically, or (3) require a lot o…
The recent rise of interest in Virtual Reality (VR) came with the availability of commodity commercial VR products, such as the Head Mounted Displays (HMD) created by Oculus and other vendors. One of the main applications of virtual reality that has been recently adopted is streaming sports events. For instance, the last olympics held in Rio De Janeiro was streamed over the Internet for users to view on VR headsets or using 360 video players. A big challenge for streaming VR sports events is the users limited bandwidth and the amount of data required to transmit 360 videos. While 360 video dem…
With 360$^{\circ}$ video, only a limited fraction of the full view is displayed at each point in time. This has prompted the design of streaming delivery techniques that allow alternative playback qualities to be delivered for each candidate viewing direction. However, while prefetching based on the user's expected viewing direction is best done close to playback deadlines, large buffers are needed to protect against shortfalls in future available bandwidth. This results in conflicting goals and an important prefetch aggressiveness tradeoff problem regarding how far ahead in time from the curr…