FIELD OF THE DISCLOSURE

The subject disclosure relates to an apparatus and method for providing content with multiplane image (MPI) transcoding.

BACKGROUND

As the world becomes increasingly connected over vast communication networks, additional opportunities are presented to target content to users. For example, volumetric videos (VVs) capture a three-dimensional (3D) scene and enable six degrees of freedom (6 DoF) in terms of changing/modifying/altering a viewpoint during playtime/playback. Many applications utilize a streaming transport service/mechanism to deliver the VVs to communication devices, such as client devices/user equipment. However, streaming VVs presents a number of challenges. For example, there is currently no known canonical representation of VVs which is computationally and memory efficient, while simultaneously providing a high degree of resolution in accordance with an arbitrary topology. Even subjecting VVs to a compression technology, the (compressed) VVs still demand large amounts of bandwidth, and thus, represent a large cost to a network operator/service provider in terms of network resource utilization/provisioning. Unlike two-dimensional (2D) videos that can be decoded using dedicated hardware, a decoding of VVs represents a significant load in terms of overhead in connection with software processing resources. Furthermore, adaptive-bitrate (ABR) video streaming systems typically have a number of parameters associated therewith, such as rate adaptation, quality-of-experience (QoE) inferences, and buffer controls. Realizing such ABR-based parameters can prove difficult in connection with conventional technologies.

