QoE-Driven and Tile-Based Adaptive Streaming for Point Clouds

Abstract

Application of point clouds is in critical demand, which, however, are composed of large amounts of data and difficult to stream in bandwidth-constrained networks. To address this, we propose a QoE-driven and tile-based adaptive streaming approach for point clouds, to reduce transmission redundancy and maximize user’s QoE. Specifically, by utilizing the perspective projection, we model the QoE of a 3D tile as a function of the bitrate of its representation, user’s view frustum and spatial position, occlusion between tiles, and the resolution of rendering device. We then formulate the QoE-optimized rate adaptation problem as a multiple-choice knapsack problem that allocates bitrates for different tiles under a given transmission capacity. We equivalently convert it as a submodular function maximization problem subject to knapsack constraints, and develop a practical greedy algorithm with a theoretical performance guarantee. Experimental results further demonstrate superiority of the proposed rate adaptation algorithm over existing schemes, in terms of both user’s visual quality and transmission efficiency.