FreeCast: Graceful Free-Viewpoint Video Delivery

Abstract

Wireless multi-view plus depth (MVD) video streaming enables free viewpoint video playback on wireless devices, where a viewer can freely synthesize any preferred virtual viewpoint from the received MVD frames. Existing schemes of wireless MVD streaming use digital-based compression to achieve better coding efficiency. However, the digital-based schemes have an issue called the cliff effect, where the video quality is a step function in terms of wireless channel quality. In addition, parameter optimization to assign quantization levels and transmission power across MVD frames are cumbersome. To realize high-quality wireless MVD video streaming, we propose a novel graceful video delivery scheme, called FreeCast . FreeCast directly transmits linear-transformed signals based on 5-D discrete cosine transform, without digital quantization and entropy coding operations. In addition, we exploit a fitting function based on a multidimensional Gaussian Markov random field model for overhead reduction to mitigate rate and power loss due to large overhead. The proposed FreeCast achieves graceful video quality with the improvement of wireless channel quality under a low overhead requirement. In addition, the parameter optimization to achieve highest video quality can be simplified by only controlling a transmission power assignment. Performance results with several test MVD video sequences show that FreeCast yields better video quality in band-limited environments by significantly decreasing the amount of overhead. For instance, structural similarity (SSIM) performance of FreeCast is approximately 0.127 higher than the existing graceful video delivery schemes across wireless channel quality, i.e., signal-to-noise ratio, of 0–25 dB at a transmission symbol rate of 37.5 Msymbols/s.