At the 137th MPEG meeting, MPEG Video coding (WG 04) has promoted its MIV Conformance and Reference software standard (ISO/IEC 23090-23) to the Committee Draft (CD) stage. The document specifies how to conduct conformance tests, and it provides reference encoder and decoder software for ISO/IEC 23090-12 MPEG Immersive video. This draft includes 18 verified and validated conformance bitstreams, and reference software based on version 12.0 of the test model (TMIV). The test model, objective metrics and some other tools are publicly available at https://gitlab.com/mpeg-i-visual.
MIV was developed to support compression of immersive video content, in which a real or virtual 3D scene is captured by multiple real or virtual cameras. The standard enables storage and distribution of immersive video content over existing and future networks, for playback with 6 degrees of freedom of view position and orientation. MIV is a flexible standard for multiview video with depth (MVD) that leverages the strong hardware support for commonly used video codecs to code volumetric video. Views may use equirectangular, perspective or orthographic projection. By pruning and packing views, MIV is able to achieve bitrates around 15 to 30 Mb/s for HEVC and a pixel rate equivalent to HEVC Level 5.2. Besides the MIV Main profile for MVD, there is the MIV Geometry absent profile, suitable for cloud-based and decoder-side depth estimation, and the MIV Extended profile, which enables coding of multi-plane images (MPI). The MIV standard is designed as a set of extensions and profile restriction on the Visual Volumetric Video-based Coding and Video-based Point Cloud Coding (ISO/IEC 23090-5) standard. The conformance bitstreams span all profiles.
In addition to conformance testing, work on the verification test is ongoing, and the carriage of MIV is specified through the Carriage of V3C Data standard (ISO/IEC 23090-10). MPEG Requirements (WG 02) will publish final use cases and requirements for MIV edition-2, which will be an evolution of the MIV standard, and MPEG Liaison and Communication (AG 3) will publish the white paper on MIV.