Rate-distortion based reconstruction optimization in distributed source coding for interactive multiview video streaming

Interactive multiview video streaming (IMVS) is an application where, as the streaming multiview video is played back in time, an observer iteratively requests one of many available views at the server. In response, the server sends the appropriate pre-encoded data to the observer, with data chosen for transmission depending on the specific transmitted data available in the observer's cache. The primary challenge in IMVS is to design a structure for the pre-encoded multiview data, so that during an IMVS streaming session, the transmission rate is appropriately traded off with the pre-encoded data storage size. Previously, we have developed novel distributed source coding (DSC) based frame configurations to optimize the said tradeoff, outperforming periodical insertions of I-frames in both transmission and storage costs. In this paper, we show that by exploiting the freedom to choose a target decoded frame at a view switching point for DSC, further performance gains can be achieved: by up to 0.7 dB in our experiments.