Progressive Sub-Aperture Image Recovery for Interactive Light Field Data Streaming

Due to the large size of a light field image, compressing and transmitting the entire data to a client before rendering any image for observation would incur a significant startup delay. In response, in interactive light field streaming (ILFS) a server synthesizes and transmits a new viewpoint image as a combination of sub-aperture images (SAIs) per user request. However, in so doing the client relies entirely on the server for reconstruction of every requested image. In this paper, we extend a previous proposal of progressive light field data transmission strategy, where the client can incrementally learn SAIs over time. Specifically, requested focal-point images are synthesized using carefully chosen weighted linear combinations of SAIs, so that recovery of SAIs amounts to inversion of a lower-triangular weight matrix-a matrix structure that enables SAI recovery without amplifying quantization noise due to lossy image coding. We design an objective function to encourage specific combinations of SAIs to increase rank of the lower-triangular weight matrix for fast SAI recovery. This new proposal reduces the size of the initial user's cache and the total number of transmitted images compared to our previous work. Experimental results show that our scheme can outperform ILFS by up to 70% in terms of BD-rate.