A Survey of Volumetric Content Streaming Approaches

Volumetric content is an important enabler for a wide range of applications such as immersive real-time 3D communications and virtual reality content viewing with interactive parallax. While nowadays there is more and more hardware that captures and presents 3D representations of the world, streaming these representations, known as volumetric content, is a key problem to be addressed. Major challenges are related to the transfer of large amounts of unstructured 3D data over bandwidth-limited networks, instant response to users' behavior, i.e. latency compensation, as well as computational complexity at both the server and client devices. To provide an overview of studies conducted in the field of volumetric content streaming, we research relevant literature, summarize different streaming schemes related to this focus. This paper provides a discussion of the challenges of volumetric content streaming, and an overview of the representative volumetric content streaming approaches proposed in the literature to date. Future directions and areas requiring further research are also discussed.