Realization of Free Viewpoint TV Based on Improved MVC

Abstract

We present a Free Viewpoint Television (FTV) application with performance improved multi-view video coding (MVC) strategy, which is intended for multimedia access in broadband networks or for future mobile terminals. The significance of our strategy is to realize client-driven FTV playback with reduced decoder output buffer requirements. The advantages of our proposed free view application are improved occlusion detection, decoding efficiency, and enabling smooth switching between different target video sequences. In the proposed coding strategy, the state-of-the-art MPEG4/H.264 decoder is utilized to make the application more applicable for common development. The encoded video bit stream contains several inter-views, which are encoded in an interleaved format based on MPEG4/H.264 encoder. On the decoder side, the encoded multi-views can be recovered with one fold or parallel state-of-the-art MPEG4/H2.64 decoder(s). Based on the client’s choice, one view is shown on the client’s display device. The perspective of view is controlled by the client with guaranteed response time and the view switching happens smoothly. The proposed Buffer Efficient MVC (BE-MVC) strategy does not require powerful decoder for the viewer side to make the application more suited for real-time operation. The comparisons of the required output buffer and decoding performance are demonstrated in this paper.