CCSS: Collaborative Research: Ubiquitous Sensing for VR/AR Immersive Communication: A Machine Learning Perspective

虚拟和增强现实系统包括从多个视角捕获场景的多视图相机传感器。所捕获的数据然后用于在用户的头戴式显示器上构建场景的沉浸式表示。这样的系统准备启用和增强许多重要的应用，例如，大型基础设施的检查、历史遗迹的存档、搜索和救援、灾难响应、军事侦察、自然资源管理和沉浸式远程呈现。然而，由于其新兴的性质，虚拟/增强现实沉浸式通信目前仅限于以离线捕获/计算机生成的内容为特征的游戏或娱乐演示、演播室类型的设置以及高端工作站以维持其高数据/计算工作量。此外，很少有人了解所需的信号采集密度和传感器在空间和时间上的位置，捕获场景的动态（运动，几何形状和纹理），可用的网络和系统资源，以及交付的沉浸质量之间的基本权衡。这使得现有的解决方案对于部署在带宽和能量受限的远程传感器上是不切实际的。该项目通过严格的分析以及在多视图时空传感和信号表示、延迟敏感通信和机器学习的交叉点上协调一致的算法和应用进展来解决这些挑战。教育和推广活动将使学生沉浸在视觉传感、无线通信和机器学习等令人兴奋的领域，并将吸引从K-12到本科阶段的代表性不足的学生。该项目的目标是在有限的采样和通信资源下，使用多个相机传感器以尽可能高的重建质量有效地捕获远程环境。这是通过四个相互关联的研究任务来实现的：（i）分析确定传感器位置和采样率的最佳时空采样策略，以最小化远程场景的重建误差;（ii）设计根据分配的采样率跨空间和时间联合嵌入采样数据的最佳信号表示方法;（iii）基于谱图理论设计在线学习采样策略，其在没有先验场景视点信号知识的情况下在探索新的传感器位置的同时采取采样动作;以及（vi）设计计算高效的自组织强化学习方法，其允许无线传感器计算满足覆盖虚拟/无线网络的低延迟要求的最佳传输调度策略。增强现实应用，同时节省其可用能量。整合，实验和原型设计活动将进行评估和验证在现实世界中的研究进展。这些技术进步将使变革性影响的各种应用成为可能。

Virtual and augmented reality systems comprise multi-view camera sensors that capture a scene from multiple perspectives. The captured data is then used to construct an immersive representation of the scene on the user's head mounted display. Such systems are poised to enable and enhance numerous important applications, e.g., inspection of large-scale infrastructure, archival of historical sites, search and rescue, disaster response, military reconnaissance, natural resource management, and immersive telepresence. However, due to its emerging nature, virtual/augmented reality immersive communication is presently limited to gaming or entertainment demonstrations featuring off-line captured/computer-generated content, studio-type settings, and high-end workstations to sustain its high data/computing workload. Moreover, there is little understanding of the fundamental trade-offs between the required signal acquisition density and sensor locations across space and time, the dynamics of the captured scene (motion, geometry, and textures), the available network and system resources, and the delivered immersion quality. This renders existing solutions impractical for deployment on bandwidth and energy constrained remote sensors. The project addresses these challenges via rigorous analysis and concerted algorithmic and application advances at the intersection of multi-view space-time sensing and signal representation, delay-sensitive communication, and machine learning. Education and outreach activities will immerse students in the exciting areas of visual sensing, wireless communications, and machine learning, and will engage underrepresented students spanning K-12 through undergraduate levels.The objective of this project is to efficiently capture a remote environment using multiple camera sensors with the highest possible reconstruction quality under limited sampling and communication resources. This is achieved through four interrelated research tasks: (i) analysis of optimal space-time sampling policies that determine the sensors' locations and sampling rates to minimize the remote scene's reconstruction error; (ii) design of optimal signal representation methods that embed the sampled data jointly across space and time according to the allocated sampling rates; (iii) design of online learning sampling policies based on spectral graph theory that take sampling actions while exploring new sensor locations in the absence of a priori scene viewpoint signal knowledge; and (vi) design of computationally efficient self-organizing reinforcement learning methods that allow the wireless sensors to compute optimal transmission scheduling policies that meet the low-latency requirements of the overlaying virtual/augmented reality application while conserving their available energy. Integration, experimentation, and prototyping activities will be conducted to asses and validate the research advances in real-world settings. These technical advances will enable diverse applications of transformative impact.