Efficient free viewpoint video-on-demand scheme realizing walk-through experience

Abstract

This paper presents an efficient video-on-demand (VOD) scheme for free viewpoint television (FTV), and proposes a data format and its data generation method to provide a walkthrough experience. We employ a hybrid rendering approach to describe a 3D scene using 3D model data for objects and textures. However, conventional hybrid rendering methods such as multi-texturing include excessive redundancy in texture data and demand a great deal of bandwidth to transmit. In this paper we propose an efficient texture data format, which removes the redundancy due to occlusion of objects by employing an orthogonal projection image for each object. The additional advantage of the data format is great simplification at the server to choose the transmitted images that correspond to the requested viewpoint. Experiments using multiview real video sequences confirm that the proposed scheme can reduce the transmission of texture data by as much as 42% compared to the conventional scheme.