At the 142nd MPEG meeting, MPEG Video Coding (WG 04) promoted its MPEG immersive video (MIV) conformance and reference software standard (ISO/IEC 23090-23) to the Final draft international standard (FDIS) stage, the last formal milestone of its approval process. The document specifies how to conduct conformance tests and provides reference encoder and decoder software for ISO/IEC 23090-12 MPEG immersive video. This draft includes 23 verified and validated conformance bitstreams and encoding and decoding reference software based on version 15.1.1 of the Test model for MPEG immersive video (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 the storage and distribution of immersive video content over existing and future networks, for playback with 6 degrees of freedom (6DoF) of view position and orientation. MIV is a flexible standard for multiview video with depth (MVD) and multi-planar video (MPI) that leverages the strong hardware support for commonly used video formats to code volumetric video. There are conformance bitstreams for all profiles, namely the MIV Main profile for MVD, the MIV Extended profile which enables MPI, and the MIV Geometry absent profile, which is suitable for use with cloud-based and decoder-side depth estimation. In addition to conformance testing, work on verification testing of MIV was finished. A formal subjective quality evaluation with “naïve” test subjects watching pre-defined pose traces in an immersive scene was performed. On average, MIV demonstrates a clear benefit over the previous state-of-the-art MPEG video standard for coding multiple views – the multiview extension of HEVC (MV-HEVC). According to the results, the average mean opinion score (MOS) savings of the MIV Main profile range from 1.20 to 4.69 (in 11-grade quality scale) for tested sequences, while for the MIV Geometry Absent profile the average savings was equal to 2.94.