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Standards-compliant HTTP Adaptive Streaming of Static Light Fields

Book Contribution - Book Chapter Conference Contribution

Static light fields are an effective technology to precisely visualize complex inanimate objects or scenes, synthetic and real-world alike, in Augmented, Mixed and Virtual Reality contexts. Such light fields are commonly sampled as a collection of 2D images. This sampling methodology inevitably gives rise to large data volumes, which in turn hampers real-time light field streaming over best effort networks, particularly the Internet. This paper advocates the packaging of the source images of a static light field as a segmented video sequence so that the light field can then be interactively network streamed in a quality-variant fashion using MPEG-DASH, the standardized HTTP Adaptive Streaming scheme adopted by leading video streaming services like YouTube and Netflix. We explain how we appropriate MPEG-DASH for the purpose of adaptive static light field streaming and present experimental results that prove the feasibility of our approach, not only from a networking but also a rendering perspective. In particular, real-time rendering performance is achieved by leveraging video decoding hardware included in contemporary consumer-grade GPUs. Important trade-offs are investigated and reported on that impact performance, both network-wise (e.g., applied sequencing order and segmentation scheme for the source images of the static light field) and rendering-wise (e.g., disk-versus-GPU caching of source images). By adopting a standardized transmission scheme and by exclusively relying on commodity graphics hardware, the net result of our work is an interoperable and broadly deployable network streaming solution for static light fields.
Book: 24TH ACM SYMPOSIUM ON VIRTUAL REALITY SOFTWARE AND TECHNOLOGY (VRST 2018)
Pages: 1 - 12
ISBN:9781450360869
Publication year:2018
Keywords:Static light fields, HTTP Adaptive Streaming, MPEG-DASH, video compression, H.264, JPEG, experimental evaluation, IBR
BOF-keylabel:yes
IOF-keylabel:yes
Accessibility:Closed