Hierarchical Fourier Disparity Layer Transmission for Light Field Streaming

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel approach to efficiently transmit light fields in the Fourier Disparity Layer (FDL) representation using a binary hierarchical scheme. The FDL model consists of a set of additive layers which can be simply shifted and summed to render a view of the light field at any angular coordinate. In order to transmit the FDL model, we propose a method for building a binary tree where the root consists of a single compound layer obtained as the sum of all the original layers. Subsequent levels of the tree are obtained by splitting a parent layer into two children layers whose sum is equal to the parent layer. Hence, the FDL model is recursively refined with additional layers at each new level, resulting in a scalable representation. An efficient scheme is proposed to encode a single image in order to split a parent layer into its two children. Thanks to this approach, the total number of images to decode for receiving the complete tree is equal to the number of layers in the original FDL model, which is typically smaller than the number of views required in the traditional light field representation.