Multi-view video streaming with mobile cameras

Abstract

Multi-view video system includes three sections: acquisition, transmission, and display. This paper focuses on the acquisition of multi-view video. Existing multi-view video acquisition studies exploit multi-camera arrays mutually connected by wires. However, this imposes the limitations of places and objects. To overcome the limitations, we exploit multiple mobile cameras and wireless networks for multi-view video acquisition. The acquisition of the multi-view video needs to achieve a reduction in video traffic while maintaining high video quality for communication between mobile cameras and an access point. This paper proposes Multi-view Video Streaming with Mobile Cameras (MVS/MC) to satisfy these requirements. MVS/MC has two features: packet overhearing and transmission order control. First, each mobile camera overhears other cameras' video packets, and encodes its own video frames using the overheard video packets. Second, the access point controls the transmission order of the mobile cameras, thus realizing bidirectional interview prediction. Bidirectional inter-view prediction exploits the inter-camera domain correlation among the mobile cameras to further remove the redundant information. Evaluations using multi-view video sequences show that, compared with existing methods, MVS/MC reduces the volume of traffic with only a slight degradation in video quality. For example, MVS/MC reduces traffic by 52 % compared to existing methods when PSNR is 36 dB.