Universal lossless coding with random user access: The cost of interactivity

We consider the problem of video compression with free viewpoint interactivity. It is well believed that allowing the user to choose its view will incur some loss in terms of compression efficiency. Here we derive the complete rate-storage region for universal lossless coding under the constraint of choosing the view at the receiver. This leads to a counterintuitive result: freely choosing its view at the receiver incurs a loss in terms of storage only and not in the transmission rate. The gain of the optimal scheme with respect to interactive schemes proposed so far is derived and a practical scheme that achieves this gain is proposed.