Region-of-Interest Compression and View Synthesis for Light Field Video Streaming

Light field videos provide a rich representation of real-world, thus the research of this technology is of urgency and interest for both the scientific community and industries. Light field applications such as virtual reality and post-production in the movie industry require a large number of viewpoints of the captured scene to achieve an immersive experience, and this creates a significant burden on light field compression and streaming. In this paper, we first present a light field video dataset captured with a plenoptic camera. Then a new region-of-interest (ROI)-based video compression method is designed for light field videos. In order to further improve the compression performance, a novel view synthesis algorithm is presented to generate arbitrary viewpoints at the receiver. The experimental evaluation of four light field video sequences demonstrates that the proposed ROI-based compression method can save 5%–7% in bitrates in comparison to conventional light field video compression methods. Furthermore, the proposed view synthesis-based compression method not only can achieve a reduction of about 50% in bitrates against conventional compression methods, but the synthesized views can exhibit identical visual quality as their ground truth.