In July 2021, MPEG has completed development of the MPEG Immersive Video (MIV) standard. MIV was developed to support compression of immersive video content in which multiple real or virtual cameras capture a real or virtual 3D scene. The standard enables 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) that leverages the strong hardware support for commonly used video codecs to code volumetric video. Views may use equirectangular, perspective, or orthographic projection. By packing and pruning views, MIV can achieve bit rates around 25 Mb/s and a pixel rate equivalent to HEVC Level 5.2. The MIV standard defines multiple profiles: (i) the MIV Main profile for MVD, (ii) the MIV Geometry Absent profile targeting cloud-based and decoder-side depth estimation, and (iii) the MIV Extended profile enabling the coding of multi-plane images (MPI).
The MIV standard is designed as a set of extensions and profile restrictions for the Visual Volumetric Video-based Coding (V3C) standard (ISO/IEC 23090-5). The main body of this standard is shared between MIV and the Video-based Point Cloud Coding (V-PCC) standard (ISO/IEC 23090-5 Annex H). It may potentially be used by other MPEG-I volumetric codecs under development. The carriage of MIV is specified through the Carriage of V3C Data standard (ISO/IEC 23090-10).
The test model and objective metrics are publicly available at https://gitlab.com/mpeg-i-visual.