The MPEG Immersive Video Standard—Current Status and Future Outlook

The MPEG immersive video (MIV) standard is the latest addition to the MPEG-I suite of standards. It focuses on the representation and coding of immersive media. MIV is designed to support virtual and extended reality applications that require six degrees of freedom visual interaction with the rendered scene. Edition-1 of MIV is now in its final phase of standardization. Leveraging conventional 2-D video codecs, the MIV standard efficiently codes volumetric scenes and allows advanced visual effects like bullet-time fly-throughs. The video feeds capturing the scene are first processed to identify a set of basic views that are augmented with additional information from all other views. The data are then intelligently packed into atlases and further compressed with any existing 2-D video codec of choice. Experimental results show BD-PSNR gains of up to 6 dB in the 10–20 Mbps range compared to a naive simulcast multiview video coding approach. This article concludes with an outlook on future extensions for the second edition of MIV.