Reducing the network bandwidth requirements for 360^∘ immersive video streaming

Abstract

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality applications are getting increasingly popular and new services are emerging in a diverse set of fields such as entertainment, art, e‐health, and smart factories. 360° videos are an advancement of classical two‐dimensional videos giving the user the impression of being immersed at the center of a scene that can be explored freely and dynamically by simply turning the head to a given region of interest (RoI). Providing a high Quality of Experience to users when streaming 360° videos over the Internet is particularly challenging due to the very high bandwidth requirements. In this letter, a scaling technique to reduce bandwidth requirements to stream omni‐directional videos is presented. An experimental investigation of the proposed approach has shown that it is possible to obtain a reduction of the required bitrate up to around 50% while gracefully degrading visual quality far from the RoI.

A DASH 360° immersive video streaming control system

“…In DASH systems the server is composed by a content generation algorithm and a storage system exposing the video segments to be downloaded. In this letter, the content generation algorithm described in 3…”

“…• scene, several content generation algorithms make use of viewport-adaptivity techniques 3 to reduce the overall bitrate of the streamed content. The basic idea of such techniques is to increase the quality in the video regions falling into the user's viewport while keeping a lower quality in regions that are likely to be out of the viewport.…”

“…4 In this letter, a complete DASH Immersive Delivery Solution is presented. The designed streaming system exploits the bitrate reduction technique presented in 3 as content generation algorithm. Moreover, a modular control algorithm has been conceived to provide both bitrate and viewport adaptivity.…”

“…Moreover, a modular control algorithm has been conceived to provide both bitrate and viewport adaptivity. With respect to our previous work, 3 this paper presents a complete system for streaming omnidirectional contents. Due to space constraints we are not able to include in this paper an overview of the state of the art in the design of immersive video streaming solutions that is instead provided in.…”

“…Due to space constraints we are not able to include in this paper an overview of the state of the art in the design of immersive video streaming solutions that is instead provided in. 3 The proposed DASH Immersive Delivery System has been evaluated under different emulated network scenarios. The obtained results show a 20% of bitrate reduction with a significant performance improvement in terms of video quality compared to the baseline case which does not employ our viewport adaptive scheme.…”