Section: Application Domains

Networked visual applications

Free-viewpoint Television (FTV) is a system for watching videos in which the user can choose its viewpoint freely and change it at anytime. To allow this navigation, many views are proposed and the user can navigate from one to the other. The goal of FTV is to propose an immersive sensation without the disadvantage of Three-dimensional television (3DTV). With FTV, a look-around effect is produced without any visual fatigue since the displayed images remain 2D. However, technical characteristics of FTV are large databases, huge numbers of users, and requests of subsets of the data, while the subset can be randomly chosen by the viewer. This requires the design of coding algorithms allowing such a random access to the pre-encoded and stored data which would preserve the compression performance of predictive coding. This research also finds applications in the context of Internet of Things in which the problem arises of optimally selecting both the number and the position of reference sensors and of compressing the captured data to be shared among a high number of users.

Broadband fixed and mobile access networks with different radio access technologies have enabled not only IPTV and Internet TV but also the emergence of mobile TV and mobile devices with internet capability. A major challenge for next internet TV or internet video remains to be able to deliver the increasing variety of media (including more and more bandwidth demanding media) with a sufficient end-to-end QoS (Quality of Service) and QoE (Quality of Experience).