Rate-distortion-optimized content-adaptive coding for immersive networked experience of sports events

This paper presents a content-adaptive coding scheme for immersive networked experience of sports events, in particular, soccer games. We assume that future sports events are captured by an array of fixed high-definition cameras which provide multiview image sequences for a free-viewpoint immersive networked experience in a home environment. We discuss a content-adaptive coding scheme for image sequences that exploits properties of such sequences and that permits efficient user interactions. In this work, we construct a rate distortion model for an image sequence to obtain the optimal bitrate allocation among static and dynamic content items. The optimal bitrate allocation results in a rate distortion performance of the coding scheme that outperforms that of conventional H.264/AVC coding significantly.