Viewport-Adaptive Navigable 360-Degree Video Delivery

TL;DR

This paper proposes a viewport-adaptive streaming system for 360-degree videos on HMDs, optimizing bandwidth by adjusting quality based on user view and scene regions, with a focus on projection methods and segment length.

Contribution

It introduces a novel server-side multi-representation approach that adapts quality regions and evaluates projection layouts, especially highlighting the cube map's advantages.

Findings

Cube map layout provides the best quality for given bit-rate.

Short video segments enable more frequent and accurate view adaptation.

Viewport-adaptive streaming reduces bandwidth waste while maintaining immersion.

Abstract

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.