Viewport-Adaptive Navigable 360-Degree Video Delivery
This addresses bandwidth efficiency for immersive 360-degree video delivery on HMDs, but it is incremental as it builds on existing adaptive streaming methods with specific optimizations.
The paper tackled the challenge of reducing bandwidth waste in 360-degree video streaming for Head-Mounted Displays by proposing a viewport-adaptive system that prepares multiple video representations with varying qualities for different scene regions, showing that the cube map layout offers the best quality for a given bit-rate budget.
The delivery and display of 360-degree videos on Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) presents many technical challenges. 360-degree videos are ultra high resolution spherical videos, which contain an omnidirectional view of the scene. However only a portion of this scene is displayed on the HMD. Moreover, HMD need to respond in 10 ms to head movements, which prevents the server to send only the displayed video part based on client feedback. To reduce the bandwidth waste, while still providing an immersive experience, a viewport-adaptive 360-degree video streaming system is proposed. The server prepares multiple video representations, which differ not only by their bit-rate, but also by the qualities of different scene regions. The client chooses a representation for the next segment such that its bit-rate fits the available throughput and a full quality region matches its viewing. We investigate the impact of various spherical-to-plane projections and quality arrangements on the video quality displayed to the user, showing that the cube map layout offers the best quality for the given bit-rate budget. An evaluation with a dataset of users navigating 360-degree videos demonstrates that segments need to be short enough to enable frequent view switches.