Bypassing Depth Maps Transmission For Immersive Video Coding

This paper addresses several downsides of the system under development in MPEG-I for coding and transmission of immersive media. We present a solution, which enables Depth-Image-Based Rendering for immersive video applications, while lifting the requirement of transmitting depth information. Instead, we estimate the depth information on the client-side from the transmitted views. The approach leads to an impressive rate saving (37.3% in average). Preserving perceptual quality in terms of MS-SSIM of synthesized views, it yields to 24.6% rate reduction for the same quality of reconstructed views after residue transmission under the MPEG-I common test conditions. Simultaneously, the required pixel rate, i.e. the number of pixels processed per second by the decoder, is reduced by 50% for any test sequence. To the author's knowledge, this is the first time that such an approach is under consideration in the context of immersive video coding.