VAD360: Viewport Aware Dynamic 360-Degree Video Frame Tiling
This addresses bandwidth inefficiencies in 360-degree video streaming for users and platforms, representing an incremental improvement over existing viewport-aware methods.
The paper tackles the problem of high bandwidth and processing power required for streaming 360-degree videos by proposing VAD360, a viewport-aware dynamic tiling mechanism that reduces pixel redundancy by up to 31.1% and saves 35.4% bandwidth compared to fixed tile methods.
360° videos a.k.a. spherical videos are getting popular among users nevertheless, omnidirectional view of these videos demands high bandwidth and processing power at the end devices. Recently proposed viewport aware streaming mechanisms can reduce the amount of data transmitted by streaming a limited portion of the frame covering the current user viewport (VP). However, they still suffer from sending a high amount of redundant data, as the fixed tile mechanisms can not provide finer granularity to the user VP. Though making the tiles smaller can provide a finer granularity for user viewport, high encoding overhead incurred. To overcome this trade-off, in this paper, we present a computational geometric approach based adaptive tiling mechanism named VAD360, which takes visual attention information on the 360° video frame as the input and provide a suitable non-overlapping variable size tile cover on the frame. Experimental results shows that VAD360 can save up to 31.1% of pixel redundancy before compression and 35.4% of bandwidth saving compared to recently proposed fixed tile configurations, providing tile schemes within 0.98($\pm$0.11)s time frame.