Using distributed source coding and depth image based rendering to improve interactive multiview video access

Multiple-views video is commonly believed to be the next significant achievement in video communications, since it enables new exciting interactive services such as free viewpoint television and immersive teleconferencing. However the interactivity requirement (i.e. allowing the user to change the viewpoint during video streaming) involves a trade-off between storage and bandwidth costs. Several solutions have been proposed in the literature, using redundant predictive frames, Wyner-Ziv frames, or a combination of them. In this paper, we adopt distributed video coding for interactive multiview video plus depth (MVD), taking advantage of depth image based rendering (DIBR) and depth-aided inpainting to fill the occlusion areas. To the authors' best knowledge, very few works in interactive MVD consider the problem of continuity of the playback during the switching among streams. Therefore we survey the existing solutions, we propose a set of techniques for MVD coding and we compare them. As main results, we observe that DIBR can help in rate reduction (up to 13.36% for the texture video and up to 8.67% for the depth map, wrt the case where DIBR is not used), and we also note that the optimal strategy to combine DIBR and distributed video coding depends on the position of the switching time into the group of pictures. Choosing the best technique on a frame-to-frame basis can further reduce the rate from 1% to 6%.