LiveVV: Human-Centered Live Volumetric Video Streaming System

Volumetric video has emerged as a prominent medium within the realm of eXtended Reality (XR) with the advancements in computer graphics and depth capture hardware. Users can fully immersive themselves in volumetric video with the ability to switch their viewport in six degree-of-freedom (DOF), including three rotational dimensions (yaw, pitch, roll) and three translational dimensions (X, Y, Z). Different from traditional 2D videos that are composed of pixel matrices, volumetric videos employ point clouds, meshes, or voxels to represent a volumetric scene, resulting in significantly larger data sizes. While previous works have successfully achieved volumetric video streaming in video-on-demand scenarios, the live streaming of volumetric video remains an unresolved challenge due to the limited network bandwidth and stringent latency constraints. In this paper, we for the first time propose a holistic live volumetric video streaming system, LiveVV, which achieves multi-view capture, scene segmentation & reuse, adaptive transmission, and rendering. LiveVV contains multiple lightweight volumetric video capture modules that are capable of being deployed without prior preparation. To reduce bandwidth consumption, LiveVV processes static and dynamic volumetric content separately by reusing static data with low disparity and decimating data with low visual saliency. Besides, to deal with network fluctuation, LiveVV integrates a volumetric video adaptive bitrate streaming algorithm (VABR) to enable fluent playback with the maximum quality of experience. Extensive real-world experiment shows that LiveVV can achieve live volumetric video streaming at a frame rate of 24 fps with a latency of less than 350ms.