QoE-Driven Adaptive Streaming for Point Clouds

With increasing popularity of virtual reality and augmented reality, application of point clouds is in critical demand as it enables users to freely navigate in an immersive scene with six degrees of freedom. However, point clouds usually comprise large amounts of data, and are thus difficult to stream in bandwidth-constrained networks. It is therefore important, yet challenging, to efficiently stream the resource-intensive point clouds, such that the user’s quality of experience (QoE) is guaranteed on a high-level but with a low bandwidth consumption. To this end, we propose a QoE-driven adaptive streaming approach for the tile-based point cloud transmission, to maximize the user’s QoE while reducing the transmission redundancy. By exploiting the perspective projection, we specifically model the QoE of a 3D tile as a function of the bitrate of its representation, user’s view frustum and spatial position, occlusion between tiles, and the resolution of rendering device. Based on this QoE model, we then formulate the QoE-optimized rate adaptation problem as a multiple-choice knapsack problem, which allocates bitrates for different tiles under a given transmission capacity. It is equivalently converted to a submodular function maximization problem subject to knapsack constraints, and solved by a practical greedy-based algorithm with a theoretical worst-case performance guarantee. The proposed algorithm is able to achieve a near-optimal performance, but with a very low computational complexity. Experimental results further demonstrate superiority of the proposed rate adaptation algorithm over existing schemes, in terms of both user’s visual quality and transmission efficiency.