ViVo: Visibility-aware Mobile Volumetric Video Streaming

Abstract

In this paper, we perform a first comprehensive study of mobile volumetric video streaming. Volumetric videos are truly 3D, allowing six degrees of freedom (6DoF) movement for their viewers during playback. Such flexibility enables numerous applications in entertainment, healthcare, education, <i>etc.</i> However, volumetric video streaming is extremely bandwidth-intensive. We conduct a detailed investigation of each of the following aspects for point cloud streaming (a popular volumetric data format): encoding, decoding, segmentation, viewport movement patterns, and viewport prediction. Motivated by the observations from the above study, we propose ViVo, which is to the best of our knowledge the first practical mobile volumetric video streaming system with three <i>visibility-aware</i> optimizations. ViVo judiciously determines the video content to fetch based on how, what and where a viewer perceives for reducing bandwidth consumption of volumetric video streaming. Our evaluations over real wireless networks (including commercial 5G), mobile devices and users indicate that ViVo can save on average 40% of data usage (up to 80%) with virtually no drop in visual quality.