Viewport-aware adaptive 360{\deg} video streaming using tiles for virtual reality

TL;DR

This paper presents a viewport-aware adaptive streaming system for 8K 360-degree VR videos that uses tiling and MPEG-DASH to improve visual quality and bandwidth efficiency based on user viewport predictions.

Contribution

The paper introduces a novel end-to-end streaming system that integrates tiling, MPEG-DASH, and viewport-aware bitrate selection for high-resolution VR videos.

Findings

System delivers high-quality 8K 360-degree video at varying network conditions.

Viewport-aware bitrate assignment improves visual quality inside the user's viewport.

Simulation results show better PSNR and SSIM compared to existing methods.

Abstract

360{\deg} video is attracting an increasing amount of attention in the context of Virtual Reality (VR). Owing to its very high-resolution requirements, existing professional streaming services for 360{\deg} video suffer from severe drawbacks. This paper introduces a novel end-to-end streaming system from encoding to displaying, to transmit 8K resolution 360{\deg} video and to provide an enhanced VR experience using Head Mounted Displays (HMDs). The main contributions of the proposed system are about tiling, integration of the MPEG-Dynamic Adaptive Streaming over HTTP (DASH) standard, and viewport-aware bitrate level selection. Tiling and adaptive streaming enable the proposed system to deliver very high-resolution 360{\deg} video at good visual quality. Further, the proposed viewport-aware bitrate assignment selects an optimum DASH representation for each tile in a viewport-aware manner. The quality performance of the proposed system is verified in simulations with varying network bandwidth using realistic view trajectories recorded from user experiments. Our results show that the proposed streaming system compares favorably compared to existing methods in terms of PSNR and SSIM inside the viewport.