Traffic Reduction for Multiple Users in Multi-view Video Streaming

Multi-view video consists of multiple video sequences captured simultaneously from different angles by multiple closely spaced cameras. It enables the users to freely change their viewpoints by playing different video sequences. Transmission of multi-view video requires more bandwidth than conventional multimedia. To reduce the bandwidth, UDMVT (User Dependent Multi-view Video Transmission) based on MVC (Multi-view Video Coding) has been proposed for single user. In UDMVT, for multiple users the same frames are encoded into different versions for each user, which increases the redundant transmission. For this problem, this paper proposes UMSM (User dependent Multi-view video Streaming for Multi-users). UMSM possesses two characteristics. The first characteristic is that the overlapped frames that are required by multiple users are transmitted only once using the multicast to avoid unnecessary duplication of transmission. The second characteristic is that a time lag of the video request by multiple users is adjusted to coincide with the next request. Simulation results using benchmark test sequences provided by MERL show that UMSM decreases the transmission bit-rate 55.3% on average for 5 users watching the same multi-view video as compared with UDMVT.