Landmarking for Navigational Streaming of Stored High-Dimensional Media

Abstract

Modern media data such as 360 videos and light field (LF) images are typically captured in much higher dimensions than the observers' visual displays. To efficiently browse high-dimensional media over bandwidth-constrained networks, a navigational streaming model is considered: a client navigates the large media space by dictating a navigation path to a server, who in response transmits the corresponding pre-encoded media data units (MDU) to the client one-by-one in sequence. Intra-coding an MDU (I-MDU) would result in a large bitrate but I-MDU can be randomly accessed, while inter-coding an MDU (P-MDU) using another MDU as a predictor incurs a small coding cost but imposes an order where the predictor must be first transmitted and decoded. From a compression perspective, the technical challenge is: how to achieve coding gain via inter-coding of MDUs, while enabling adequate random access for satisfactory user navigation. To address this problem, we propose landmarks, a selection of key MDUs from the high-dimensional media. Using landmarks as predictors, nearby MDUs in local neighborhoods are intercoded, resulting in a predictive MDU structure with controlled coding cost. It means that any requested MDU can be decoded by at most transmitting a landmark and an inter-coded MDU, enabling navigational random access. To build a landmarked MDU structure, we employ tree-structured vector quantizer (TSVQ) to first optimize landmark locations, then iteratively add/remove inter-coded MDUs as refinements using a fast branch-and-bound technique. Taking interactive LF images and viewport adaptive 360 images as illustrative applications, and I-, P- and previously proposed merge frames to intra- and inter-code MDUs, we show experimentally that landmarked MDU structures can noticeably reduce the expected transmission cost compared with MDU structures without landmarks.