Timeliness-Fidelity Tradeoff in 3D Scene Representations

TL;DR

This paper explores the balance between timeliness and fidelity in real-time 3D scene representations, proposing a framework and a PPO-based method to optimize scene quality under communication delays.

Contribution

It introduces a framework to evaluate the impact of communication delay and proposes a PPO-based approach leveraging AoI to enhance 3D scene fidelity in real-time scenarios.

Findings

Communication delay significantly affects 3D scene quality.

The proposed method achieves optimal scene representation results.

Simulation confirms the effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

Real-time three-dimensional (3D) scene representations serve as one of the building blocks that bolster various innovative applications, e.g., digital manufacturing, Virtual/Augmented/Extended/Mixed Reality (VR/AR/XR/MR), and the metaverse. Despite substantial efforts that have been made to real-time communications and computing, real-time 3D scene representations remain a challenging task. This paper investigates the tradeoff between timeliness and fidelity in real-time 3D scene representations. Specifically, we establish a framework to evaluate the impact of communication delay on the tradeoff, where the real-world scenario is monitored by multiple cameras that communicate with an edge server. To improve fidelity for 3D scene representations, we propose to use a single-step Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) method that leverages the Age of Information (AoI) to decide if the received image needs to be involved in 3D scene representations and rendering. We test our framework and the proposed approach with different well-known 3D scene representation methods. Simulation results reveal that real-time 3D scene representation can be sensitively affected by communication delay, and our proposed method can achieve optimal 3D scene representation results.