Striking a balance between minimizing bandwidth consumption and maintaining high visual quality stands as the paramount objective in volumetric content delivery. However, achieving this ambitious target is a substantial challenge, especially for mobile devices with constrained computational resources, given the voluminous amount of 3D data to be streamed, strict latency requirements, and high computational load. Inspired by the advantages offered by neural radiance fields (NeRF), we propose, for the first time, to deliver volumetric videos by utilizing neural-based content representations. We delve deep into potential challenges and explore viable solutions for both video-on-demand (VOD) and live video streaming services, in terms of the end-to-end pipeline, real-time and high-quality streaming, rate adaptation, and viewport adaptation. Our preliminary results lend credence to the feasibility of our research proposition, offering a promising starting point for further investigation.
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This content will become publicly available on October 2, 2024
MetaStream: Live Volumetric Content Capture, Creation, Delivery, and Rendering in Real Time
While recent work explored streaming volumetric content on-demand, there is little effort on live volumetric video streaming that bears the potential of bringing more exciting applications than its on-demand counterpart. To fill this critical gap, in this paper, we propose MetaStream, which is, to the best of our knowledge, the first practical live volumetric content capture, creation, delivery, and rendering system for immersive applications such as virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. To address the key challenge of the stringent latency requirement for processing and streaming a huge amount of 3D data, MetaStream integrates several innovations into a holistic system, including dynamic camera calibration, edge-assisted object segmentation, cross-camera redundant point removal, and foveated volumetric content rendering. We implement a prototype of MetaStream using commodity devices and extensively evaluate its performance. Our results demonstrate that MetaStream achieves low-latency live volumetric video streaming at close to 30 frames per second on WiFi networks. Compared to state-of-the-art systems, MetaStream reduces end-to-end latency by up to 31.7% while improving visual quality by up to 12.5%.
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- NSF-PAR ID:
- 10467140
- Publisher / Repository:
- ACM
- Date Published:
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 1 to 15
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Location:
- Madrid Spain
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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