Compression techniques for active video content

Summary for only given. Conventional digital video playback systems provide only limited user interactivity, mostly in the form of VCR-like controls. In this model, the temporal ordering and the spatial viewpoints of the video streams being viewed are completely determined at authoring time. In contrast, we have defined a form of interactive video called active video (see http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu//spl sim/anindya/avs/avs.html, 2002), which supports hyper-linking among related video sequences and interpolation of video sequences with neighboring viewpoints, to offer end users the additional flexibility of choosing the sequencing and the viewing angle (even virtual ones) at playback time. However, active video has a substantially higher storage and transmission cost due to multiple time-synchronized video streams capturing the dynamic scene and the pixel-level correspondence maps encoding the spatial association among the frame-pairs of all adjacent streams. The maps are interpolated at run-time to generate virtual views. We describe and evaluate the following three compression techniques that alleviate the storage and network transmission costs of active video: spatial video compression; lossy map compression; lossless map compression.