Fast Multirate Encoding for 360{\deg} Video in OMAF Streaming Workflows

TL;DR

This paper introduces fast multirate encoding strategies for 360-degree video in OMAF streaming, significantly reducing encoding time while maintaining quality, especially for high-resolution content and tiled projections.

Contribution

It proposes two novel cross-resolution analysis-reuse pipelines that accelerate HEVC encoding for 360-degree videos, including tiled formats, with minimal quality loss.

Findings

Encoding time reduced by up to 59% for ERP content.

Average 51% time reduction for CMP-tiled content.

Speedups of up to 4.2x with minimal rate-distortion impact.

Abstract

Preparing high-quality 360-degree video for HTTP Adaptive Streaming requires encoding each sequence into multiple representations spanning different resolutions and quantization parameters (QPs). For ultra-high-resolution immersive content such as 8K 360-degree video, this process is computationally intensive due to the large number of representations and the high complexity of modern codecs. This paper investigates fast multirate encoding strategies that reduce encoding time by reusing encoder analysis information across QPs and resolutions. We evaluate two cross-resolution information-reuse pipelines that differ in how reference encodes propagate across resolutions: (i) a strict HD -> 4K -> 8K cascade with scaled analysis reuse, and (ii) a resolution-anchored scheme that initializes each resolution with its own highest-bitrate reference before guiding dependent encodes. In addition to evaluating these pipelines on standard equirectangular projection content, we also apply the same two pipelines to cubemap-projection (CMP) tiling, where each 360-degree frame is partitioned into independently encoded tiles. CMP introduces substantial parallelism, while still benefiting from the proposed multirate analysis-reuse strategies. Experimental results using the SJTU 8K 360-degree dataset show that hierarchical analysis reuse significantly accelerates HEVC encoding with minimal rate-distortion impact across both equirectangular and CMP-tiled content, yielding encoding-time reductions of roughly 33%-59% for ERP and about 51% on average for CMP, with Bjontegaard Delta Encoding Time (BDET) gains approaching -50% and wall-clock speedups of up to 4.2x.