Multi-Plane Image Video Compression

Multi-plane Images (MPI) is a new approach for storing volumetric content. MPI represents a 3D scene within a view frustum with typically 32 planes of texture and transparency information per camera. MPI literature to date has been focused on still images but applying MPI to video will require substantial compression in order to be viable for real world productions. In this paper, we describe several techniques for compressing MPI video sequences by reducing pixel rate while maintaining acceptable visual quality. We focus on using traditional video compression codecs such as HEVC. While certainly a new codec algorithm specifically tailored to MPI would likely achieve very good results, no such devices exist today that support this hypothetical MPI codec. By comparison, hundreds of millions of real-time HEVC decoders are present in laptops and TVs today.