Collaborative view synthesis for interactive multi-view video streaming

Interactive multi-view video enables users to enjoy the video from different viewpoints. Yet multi-view dramatically in-creases the video data volume and their computation, mak-ing realtime transmission and interactions a challenging task. It therefore calls for efficient view synthesis strategies that flexibly generate visual views. In this paper, we present a collaborative view synthesis strategy for online interactive multi-view video streaming based on Depth-Image Based Rendering (DIBR) view synthesis technology, which gener-ates a visual view with the texture and depth information on both sides. Different from the traditional DIBR algorithm for single view synthesis, we explore the collaboration rela-tionship between different viewpoints synthesis for a range of visual views generation, and propose Shift DIBR (S-DIBR). In S-DIBR, only the projected pixels, rather than all the pixels of the reference view, are utilized for next visual view generation. Therefore, the computation complexity of pro-jection transform, which is the most computation intensive process in the traditional DIBR algorithm, is reduced to fulfill the requirement of online interactive streaming. Ex-periment results validate the efficiency of our collaborative view synthesis strategy, as well as the bandwidth scalability of the streaming system