Towards View-Aware Adaptive Streaming of Holographic Content

Holography is able to reconstruct a three dimensional structure of an object by recording full wave fields of light emitted from the object. This requires a huge amount of data to be encoded, stored, transmitted, and decoded for holographic content, making it a practical usage challenging, specifically for bandwidth-constrained networks and memory-limited devices. In the delivery of holographic content via the internet, bandwidth wastage should be avoided to tackle high bandwidth demands of holography streaming. For real-time applications, encoding time-complexity is also a major problem.In this paper, the concept of Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) is extended to holography image streaming and view-aware adaptation techniques are studied. As each area of a hologram contains information of a specific view and instead of encoding and decoding the entire hologram, just the part required to render the selected view is encoded and transmitted via the network based on the users’ interactivity. Four different strategies, namely, (i) monolithic, (ii) single view, (iii) adaptive view, and (iv) non-real time streaming are explained and compared in terms of (a) bandwidth requirements, (b) encoding time-complexity, and (c) bitrate overhead. Experimental results show that the view-aware methods reduce the required bandwidth for holography streaming at the cost of a bitrate increase.