Inter-view-predicted redundant pictures for viewpoint switching in multiview video streaming

Interactive selection of the desired viewpoint is one important feature in multiview video streaming. When receivers differ in the number of simultaneously displayed views, it is challenging to optimize the multiview coding structure particularly when it comes to the use of inter-view prediction and anchor picture frequency. This paper presents a coding and transmission scheme for streaming to clients of different display capabilities. The scheme saves transmission bandwidth by sending only those views that are displayed in a receiver. Furthermore, the scheme enables viewpoint switching through inter-view-predicted redundant pictures representing different sets of views being switched from and switched to. When switching happens at a switch point, an appropriate redundant picture is adaptively chosen based on which views were transmitted before and will be transmitted after the switch point. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme improves the rate-distortion (RD) performance compared to simple anchor picture insertion.