Implementing Partial Atlas Selector for Viewport-dependent MPEG Immersive Video Streaming

The ISO/IEC 23090-12 MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) standard technology, which provides immersive volumetric scenes with six degrees of freedom (6DoF), has recently been the subject of research and development efforts. The key concept of MIV technology is to generate an atlas that is a minimal representation of the multiple source view, with a low pixel rate to limit the number of existing video decoder instantiations. However, this atlas generation process produces dependencies between views in the reconstruction. This inability of conventional MIV to independently transmit and decode portions of the source view is a major challenge for 6DoF viewport-dependent streaming. This paper proposes a framework that can independently select and transmit only the atlas of the required area when rendering immersive content. This paper also presents a visibility calculation method to determine the importance of each atlas for viewport rendering. Experiments with a limited pixel rate under experimental conditions have shown that a highly efficient 6DoF viewport-dependent streaming system is achievable. The proposed method has been implemented with high-level syntax conformance in the MIV test model software, so this framework can be deployed with various adaptive streaming systems along with MIV bitstream in the future.