Optimized Data Representation for Interactive Multiview Navigation

In contrary to traditional media streaming services where a unique media content is delivered to different users, interactive multiview navigation applications enable users to choose their own viewpoints and freely navigate in a three-dimensional scene. The interactivity brings new challenges in addition to the classical rate-distortion tradeoff, which considers only the compression performance and viewing quality. On one hand, interactivity necessitates sufficient viewpoints for richer navigation; on the other hand, it requires to provide low bandwidth and delay costs for smooth navigation during view transitions. In this paper, we formally describe the novel tradeoffs posed by the navigation interactivity and classical rate-distortion criterion. Based on an original formulation, we look for the optimal design of the data representation by introducing novel rate and distortion models and practical solving algorithms. Experiments show that the proposed data representation method outperforms the baseline solution by providing lower resource consumptions and higher visual quality in all navigation configurations, which certainly confirms the potential of the proposed data representation in practical interactive navigation systems.