Interactive Omnidirectional Video Delivery: A Bandwidth Effective Approach

Omnidirectional video is a new media 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 as video surveillance, robotics and military applications already make use of omnidirectional video. Streaming of spherical video content actually started with static content e.g. for cultural heritage [6] and has moved now towards video with higher resolutions, and higher quality thanks to the evolution of omnidirectional capture devices. Interactivity, in this context, refers to the fact that the user is able to explore and navigate audio-visual scenes by freely choosing viewpoint and viewing direction. In order to provide this key feature, omnidirectional video is typically represented as a classical 2D rectangular panorama video (cylindrical projection into latitude and longitude [12]) that is then