FVV Live: A real-time free-viewpoint video system with consumer electronics hardware

Abstract

FVV Live is a novel end-to-end free-viewpoint video system, designed for low\ncost and real-time operation, based on off-the-shelf components. The system has\nbeen designed to yield high-quality free-viewpoint video using consumer-grade\ncameras and hardware, which enables low deployment costs and easy installation\nfor immersive event-broadcasting or videoconferencing.\n The paper describes the architecture of the system, including acquisition and\nencoding of multiview plus depth data in several capture servers and virtual\nview synthesis on an edge server. All the blocks of the system have been\ndesigned to overcome the limitations imposed by hardware and network, which\nimpact directly on the accuracy of depth data and thus on the quality of\nvirtual view synthesis. The design of FVV Live allows for an arbitrary number\nof cameras and capture servers, and the results presented in this paper\ncorrespond to an implementation with nine stereo-based depth cameras.\n FVV Live presents low motion-to-photon and end-to-end delays, which enables\nseamless free-viewpoint navigation and bilateral immersive communications.\nMoreover, the visual quality of FVV Live has been assessed through subjective\nassessment with satisfactory results, and additional comparative tests show\nthat it is preferred over state-of-the-art DIBR alternatives.\n