Towards zero-latency video transmission through frame extrapolation

In the past few years, several efforts have been devoted to reduce individual sources of latency in video delivery, including acquisition, coding and network transmission. The goal is to improve the quality of experience in applications requiring real-time interaction. Nevertheless, these efforts are fundamentally constrained by technological and physical limits. In this paper, we investigate a radically different approach that can arbitrarily reduce the overall latency by means of video extrapolation. We propose two latency compensation schemes where video extrapolation is performed either at the encoder or at the decoder side. Since a loss of fidelity is the price to pay for compensating latency arbitrarily, we study the latency-fidelity compromise using three recent video prediction schemes. Our preliminary results show that by accepting a quality loss, we can compensate a typical latency of 100 ms with a loss of 8 dB in PSNR with the best extrapolator. This approach is promising but also suggests that further work should be done in video prediction to pursue zero-latency video transmission.