A packetization strategy for interactive multiview video streaming over lossy networks

Interactive multiview video streaming (IMVS) applications permit to freely navigate within 3D scenes. This endows end-users the immersive and virtual reality experiences. Any additional viewpoint of interest can be virtually synthesized by received texture views with associated depth maps. In this paper, we consider the setup where both the encoded texture and depth bitstreams experience packet losses during network streaming. We investigate two packetization strategies and develop a novel strategy to improve error-resilience capabilities for multiview video plus depth transmission, where texture data and the corresponding depth go into the same packet. We examine the resulting distortion of different packetization schemes and analyze the real difference between them in diverse scenarios. In particular, we take into account: (i) various packet loss patterns, where the effect of a burst loss is identified as an important characteristic; (ii) two packet loss models that characterize different probabilities for each scenario. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with the competing approach, our proposed packetization scheme increases the visual quality by up to 2.32 dB and 1.55 dB for texture views and synthesized views, respectively.