Viewport-Adaptive Encoding and Streaming of 360-Degree Video for Virtual Reality Applications

Virtual reality applications use 360-degree videos and head mount displays (HMDs) with stereoscopic capabilities to provide full immersion experience. In these applications it is also common to use 4K resolution or higher per view for 360-degree videos. Consequently, this leads to technical challenges in handling the bandwidth requirements while keeping the system latency to the minimal. When the content is viewed with a HMD, a subset of the entire 360-degree video is displayed at a single point of time. To improve the resolution and picture quality of the displayed content, viewport based coding is desirable. In this regard, we investigated various viewport dependent projection schemes including the existing variants of Pyramidal projection. In this regard we propose the multi-resolution versions of Equirectangular and Cubemap projections. Additionally, we developed a methodology for comparing the rate-distortion performance of these projections. Based on the simulation results, it was observed that multi-resolution projections of Equirectangle and Cubemap outperform other projection schemes, significantly.