Coding and replication co-design for interactive multiview video streaming
Multiview video refers to the simultaneous capturing of multiple video views with an array of closely spaced cameras. In an interactive multiview video streaming (IMVS) system, a client can play back the content in time in a single view, and may observe a scene of interest by switching to different viewpoints. Users independently choose their own view navigation paths through the high-dimensional multiview data. Distributed servers are deployed to collaboratively replicate video content in order to support user scalability. Such a system typically presents challenges in both coding and content replication. In coding, the multiview video must be encoded in order to support efficient view-switching and distributed replication. In content replication, it is important to decide which data blocks to store at each server to facilitate view-switches at any time. In this paper, we co-design a coding structure and a distributed content replication strategy. First, we propose a coding structure based on redundant P-frames and distributed source coding (DSC) frames to achieve efficiency in coding, view switches and content replication. We then propose a heuristic-based distributed and cooperative replication strategy to take advantage of the correlation between the multiple views for resource-effective content delivery. Simulation results show that our coding and replication co-design is cost-effective in supporting IMVS services.