The Mosaic Camera: Streaming, Coding and Compositing Experiments

The HP Fan Camera is a panoramic mosaic king camera that is a composite of 24-imager array system. Streaming the captured video is a challenging problem due to several factors such as the large bandwidth requirements, the limited capabilities of the client's machines, and our desire to provide independent viewing controls for users. In the process of developing an optimal rate controller for the HP Fan Camera we developed a client-server framework for multi-camera streaming and performed a set of experiments using various bandwidth allocation schemes. From our preliminary research, we found that sending individual streams of the cameras over the network provides more interactivity to the end users and requires less bandwidth in case the behavior of the end users is aggressive in scene selection. In this paper we present this framework and share the results of our conducted experiments.