A Tutorial on Immersive Video Delivery: From Omnidirectional Video to Holography

 A Tutorial on Immersive Video Delivery: From Omnidirectional Video to Holography

IEEE Communications Surveys and Tutorials

[PDF]

Jeroen van der Hooft (Ghent University, Belgium), Hadi Amirpour (AAU, Austria), Maria Torres Vega (KU Leuven, Belgium), Yago Sanchez (Fraunhofer/HHI), Raimund Schatz (AIT, Austria), Thomas Schierl (Fraunhofer/HHI, Germany), and Christian Timmerer (AAU, Austria)

Abstract: Video services are evolving from traditional two-dimensional video to virtual reality and holograms, which offer six degrees of freedom to users, enabling them to freely move around in a scene and change focus as desired. However, this increase in freedom translates into stringent requirements in terms of ultra-high bandwidth (in the order of Gigabits per second) and minimal latency (in the order of milliseconds). To realize such immersive services, the network transport, as well as the video representation and encoding, have to be fundamentally enhanced. The purpose of this tutorial article is to provide an elaborate introduction to the creation, streaming, and evaluation of immersive video. Moreover, it aims to provide lessons learned and to point at promising research paths to enable truly interactive immersive video applications toward holography.

Keywords—Immersive video delivery, 3DoF, 6DoF, omnidirectional video, volumetric video, point clouds, meshes, light fields, holography, end-to-end systems

J. van der Hooft, H. Amirpour, M. Torres Vega, Y. Sanchez, R. Schatz, T. Schierl, C. Timmerer, "A Tutorial on Immersive Video Delivery: From Omnidirectional Video to Holography," in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 25, no. 2, pp. 1336-1375, Secondquarter 2023, doi: 10.1109/COMST.2023.3263252.

Immersive Video Delivery: From Omnidirectional Video to Holography from Alpen-Adria-Universität

A Survey on Bitrate Adaptation Schemes for Streaming Media over HTTP

A Survey on Bitrate Adaptation Schemes for Streaming Media over HTTP

[PDF] *** open access ***

Abdelhak Bentaleb, Member, IEEE, Bayan Taani, Member, IEEE, Ali C. Begen, Senior Member, IEEE, Christian Timmerer, Senior Member, IEEE, and Roger Zimmermann, Senior Member, IEEE

HAS adaptation scheme classification.

Abstract --- In this survey, we present state-of-the-art bitrate adaptation algorithms for HTTP adaptive streaming (HAS). As a key distinction from other streaming approaches, the bitrate adaptation algorithms in HAS are chiefly executed at each client, i.e., in a distributed manner. The objective of these algorithms is to ensure a high Quality of Experience (QoE) for viewers in the presence of bandwidth fluctuations due to factors like signal strength, network congestion, network reconvergence events, etc. While such fluctuations are common in public Internet, they can also occur in home networks or even managed networks where there is often admission control and QoS tools. Bitrate adaptation algorithms may take factors like bandwidth estimations, playback buffer fullness, device features, viewer preferences, and content features into account, albeit with different weights. Since the viewer’s QoE needs to be determined in real-time during playback, objective metrics are generally used including number of buffer stalls, duration of startup delay, frequency and amount of quality oscillations, and video instability. By design, the standards for HAS do not mandate any particular adaptation algorithm, leaving it to system builders to innovate and implement their own method. This survey provides an overview of the different methods proposed over the last several years.

Citation: A. Bentaleb, B. Taani, A. C. Begen, C. Timmerer and R. Zimmermann, "A Survey on Bitrate Adaptation Schemes for Streaming Media Over HTTP," in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 21, no. 1, pp. 562-585, Firstquarter 2019.
doi: 10.1109/COMST.2018.2862938

MPEG Survey on Virtual Reality

(c) Bitmovin

As mentioned in my previous blog post, virtual reality is becoming a hot topic across the industry (and also academia) which also reaches standards developing organizations like MPEG. MPEG established an Ad-hoc Group on MPEG-VR (open to everyone) which published a survey on virtual reality. The survey is still open until August 18, 2016 and available here...

[English] https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MPEG-Virtual-Reality
[Chinese] https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/MPEG-Virtual-Reality-Chinese

In particular, MPEG is seeking feedback from content and service providers as well as device manufacturers. Please help to shape the future!

(c) Bitmovin

Within Bitmovin we're working on this topic in a Web context and a demo is available here. Additionally, here's a live 4K VR/360 demo using HEVC: http://bitmovin.com/public-demos/360andVR/ (Note: requires HEVC hardware support at your device).