Bandwidth-Efficient Mobile Volumetric Video Streaming by Exploiting Inter-Frame Correlation
Yizong Wang, Dong Yang Zhao, Huanhuan Zhang, Teng Gao, Zixuan Guo, Chenghao Huang, Huadóng Ma · IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing · 2024
Volumetric videos offer viewers more immersive experiences, enabling a variety of applications. However, state-of-the-art streaming systems still need hundreds of Mbps bandwidth to transmit volumetric videos, exceeding the common bandwidth capabilities of mobile devices. We find a research gap in reusing inter-frame redundant information to reduce bandwidth consumption, while the existing inter-frame compression methods rely on the so-calledexplicit correlation, i.e., the redundancy from the same/adjacent locations in the previous frame, which does not apply to highly dynamic frames or dynamic viewports. This paper introduces a new concept calledimplicit correlation, i.e., the consistency of topological structures, which stably exists in dynamic frames and is beneficial for reducing bandwidth consumption. We design a mobile volumetric video streaming system Hermes consisting of an implicit correlation encoder to reduce bandwidth consumption and a hybrid streaming method that adapts to dynamic viewports. Experiments on public datasets show that Hermes achieves a frame rate of 30+ FPS over daily networks and on commodity smartphones, with at least 3.64× and 3.34× improvement compared with two state-of-the-art baselines, respectively.