Evaluation of bandwidth performance for interactive spherical video
01 July 2011
Spherical Video is nowadays popular, in particular for interactive on-line entertainment multimedia applications such as Google Street View, as well as for Geographical Information Systems (GIS), video surveillance applications etc. The user is able to explore and navigate audio/visual scenes by freely choosing viewpoint and viewing direction.
Spherical Video is typically represented as a classical 2D rectangular panorama video that is then mapped on a sphere mesh and finally rendered on the user's screen. Existing transmission models of spherical video encode the full panorama video with uniform quality while the sphere mesh is kept implicit.
However, in general, the user can only view a restricted field-of-view of the spherical content and then interact with pan-tilt-zoom commands. In this paper we evaluate the relevance and optimality of a personalized transmission where the panorama video is decomposed into tiles, which are transmitted at a quality modulated in the spherical regions depending on their likelihood to be visualized from the user interactions.
Index Terms-- Interactive Spherical Video, RoI, Tiling, Video Compression 1. INTRODUCTION Spherical Video is becoming more and more popular thanks to its interactivity for on-line multimedia applications such as Geographical Information Systems (GIS) (e.g., Google Street View [3]), Immersive Media live and interactive streaming [5]. These applications are not limited to entertainment since video surveillance, robotics and military applications already make use of spherical video.
