VAD360: Viewport Aware Dynamic 360-Degree Video Frame Tiling

TL;DR

VAD360 introduces an adaptive tiling method for 360-degree videos that leverages visual attention data to reduce redundancy and bandwidth usage while maintaining real-time performance.

Contribution

It presents a novel geometric approach for dynamic, attention-aware tiling that improves over fixed tile schemes in efficiency and bandwidth savings.

Findings

Reduces pixel redundancy by up to 31.1% before compression.

Achieves up to 35.4% bandwidth savings.

Operates within approximately 1 second for real-time tiling.

Abstract

360{\deg} 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{\deg} 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.