Free-viewpoint Video Communication Using Multi-view Video Coding

Abstract

We propose a video communication method that lets the user freely change his/her viewing position and viewing direction. Free-viewpoint video is a next-generation visual application that has been extensively studied and discussed by the international MPEG standard body as 3DAV (three-dimensional audio and visual). For this application, we propose a multi-view video coding method and communication protocol. We also describe a free-viewpoint video viewer that generates a natural view from an arbitrary viewing position and viewing direction, using decoded multi-view video data and generated image data by the Ray-Space interpolation and extrapolation methods.