The ACM Multimedia Systems Conference (MMSys 2018) was held between June 12 and 15 in Amsterdam. More than 30 papers were presented at the event under the “research track,” but there was only one winner for the Best Paper Award: a research conducted by Xavier Corbillon, Francesca De Simone, Gwendal Simon, and Pascal Frossard on “Dynamic Adaptive Streaming for Multi-Viewpoint Omnidirectional Videos.”

Francesca De Simone and Pascal Frossard are well-recognized names at EPFL’s Signal Processing Laboratory (LTS4). Dr De Simone was involved in the research project during her affiliation with LTS4 as Visiting Researcher; she is currently Scientific Staff Member at CWI’s Distributed and Interactive Systems. On the other hand, Professor Frossard has been heading LTS4 since he joined EPFL in 2003.

The research paper delves into the multi-viewpoint (MVP) 360-degree video streaming system, where a scene is simultaneously captured by multiple omnidirectional video cameras. The user can only switch positions to predefined viewpoints (VPs). The authors present several options for video encoding with existing technologies and for the implementation of VP switching. Their study is a noteworthy advancement in the Virtual Reality space, where several questions are being asked about the implementation of six Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) applications. The results of the research highlight the importance of conducting further studies on VP switching prediction to reduce bandwidth consumption and to measure the impact of VP switching delay on the subjective Quality of Experience (QoE).

The paper was chosen by a committee appointed by Comcast and organizers of MMSys 2018. Their decision was based on the paper’s contribution, novelty, and presentation quality.

Link to the paper:
http://perso.telecom-bretagne.eu/gwendalsimon/data/Omnidirectionnal_Multiview_authorVersion.pdf