Progressive communication for interactive light field image data streaming

Light field (LF) imaging captures multiple intensities and directions of light per pixel during acquisition in a 3D scene, so that novel images of different viewpoints or focal points can be synthesized. However, transmitting all LF data before viewer observation incurs a large startup delay. To avoid such delay, we propose a new interactive LF streaming framework, where a client periodically requests viewpoint images, and in response a server synthesizes and transmits each requested image as a carefully chosen sparse linear combination of sub-aperture images. For each received synthesized image, the client “decodes” and recovers a new sub-aperture image using a cache of known sub-aperture images. As the cache of decoded sub-aperture images grows over time, the client becomes capable of synthesizing new view/focal point images, reducing overall transmission cost. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme can deliver synthesized images at high quality, even though only sparse sub-aperture images are used for synthesis. Moreover, compared with a scenario where the requested synthesized images are always transmitted, our proposed scheme achieves a significant reduction in accumulated rate when a sufficient number of images are transmitted.