A Sub-Aperture Image Selection Refinement Method for Progressive Light Field Transmission

Light field cameras capture the emanated light from a scene. This type of images allows for changing point of views or focal points by processing the captured information. Recently, a Progressive Light Field Communication (PLFC) was proposed. PLFC addresses an interactive Light Field (LF) streaming framework, where a client requests a certain view or focal point and a server synthesizes and transmits each requested image as a linear combination of Sub-Aperture Images (SAI). The main idea of PLFC is that as the virtual views are transmitted, the client gradually learns information about the LF, so eventually the client may posses enough information to locally create the virtual view at the required quality, avoiding the transmission of a new image. In order to PLFC work, an optimization algorithm which selects the SAIs that are used to create a certain virtual view is requested. Here, we improve over the previous PLFC proposal by presenting a method that focuses on a refinement algorithm for SAI selection, using dynamic Quantization Parameter (QP) during encoding, using an automatic method to determine the Lagrangian multiplier during optimization and modifying how the initial required cache is created. These proposed changes in the algorithm produce significant gains. The results shows gains up to 85.8% on BD-rate compared to trivial LF transmissions, whereas they're up to 32.8% compared to previous PLFC.