The delivery and display of 360-degree videos on Head-Mounted Displays (HMDs) presents many technical challenges. 360-degree videos are ultra high resolution spherical videos, which contain an omnidirectional view of the scene. However only a portion of this scene is displayed on the HMD. Moreover, HMD need to respond in 10 ms to head movements, which prevents the server to send only the displayed video part based on client feedback. To reduce the bandwidth waste, while still providing an immersive experience, a viewport-adaptive 360-degree video streaming system is proposed. The server prepares multiple video representations, which differ not only by their bit-rate, but also by the qualities of different scene regions. The client chooses a representation for the next segment such that its bit-rate fits the available throughput and a full quality region matches its viewing. We investigate the impact of various spherical-to-plane projections and quality arrangements on the video quality displayed to the user, showing that the cube map layout offers the best quality for the given bit-rate budget. An evaluation with a dataset of users navigating 360-degree videos demonstrates that segments need to be short enough to enable frequent view switches.
An intuitive idea to address the problem of resource waste due to the delivery of non-displayed video data is to stream only the part of the video that corresponds to the viewport. This solution however does not enable fast navigation within the @math -degree video: When the client moves the head, the center changes, requiring a new viewport to be immediately displayed. Since the device has no knowledge about other parts of the spherical video, it has to notify the server about the head movement and wait for the reception of the newly adjusted viewport. As seen in other interactive multimedia systems @cite_18 , this solution cannot meet the 10 ms latency requirement in the standard Internet, even with the assistance of CDN . In addition, this solution requires the server to extract a part of the video (thus to spend computing resources) for each client connection.
@cite_18
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We present a novel client-driven multiview video streaming system that allows a user to watch 3D video interactively with significantly reduced bandwidth requirements by transmitting a small number of views selected according to his her head position. The user's head position is tracked and predicted into the future to select the views that best match the user's current viewing angle dynamically. Prediction of future head positions is needed so that views matching the predicted head positions can be prefetched in order to account for delays due to network transport and stream switching. The system allocates more bandwidth to the selected views in order to render the current viewing angle. Highly compressed, lower quality versions of some other views are also prefetched for concealment if the current user viewpoint differs from the predicted viewpoint. An objective measure based on the abruptness of the head movements and delays in the system is introduced to determine the number of additional lower quality views to be prefetched. The proposed system makes use of multiview coding (MVC) and scalable video coding (SVC) concepts together to obtain improved compression efficiency while providing flexibility in bandwidth allocation to the selected views. Rate-distortion performance of the proposed system is demonstrated under different experimental conditions. Video on-demand streaming from Internet-based servers is becoming one of the most important services offered by wireless networks today. In order to improve the area spectral efficiency of video transmission in cellular systems, small cells heterogeneous architectures (e.g., femtocells, WiFi off-loading) are being proposed, such that video traffic to nomadic users can be handled by short-range links to the nearest small cell access points (referred to as "helpers"). As the helper deployment density increases, the backhaul capacity becomes the system bottleneck. In order to alleviate such bottleneck we propose a system where helpers with low-rate backhaul but high storage capacity cache popular video files. Files not available from helpers are transmitted by the cellular base station. We analyze the optimum way of assigning files to the helpers, in order to minimize the expected downloading time for files. We distinguish between the uncoded case (where only complete files are stored) and the coded case, where segments of Fountain-encoded versions of the video files are stored at helpers. We show that the uncoded optimum file assignment is NP-hard, and develop a greedy strategy that is provably within a factor 2 of the optimum. Further, for a special case we provide an efficient algorithm achieving a provably better approximation ratio of @math , where @math is the maximum number of helpers a user can be connected to. We also show that the coded optimum cache assignment problem is convex that can be further reduced to a linear program. We present numerical results comparing the proposed schemes. Video on-demand streaming from Internet-based servers is becoming one of the most important services offered by wireless networks today. In order to improve the area spectral efficiency of video transmission in cellular systems, small cells heterogeneous architectures (e.g., femtocells, WiFi off-loading) are being proposed, such that video traffic to nomadic users can be handled by short-range links to the nearest small cell access points (referred to as “helpers”). As the helper deployment density increases, the backhaul capacity becomes the system bottleneck. In order to alleviate such bottleneck we propose a system where helpers with low-rate backhaul but high storage capacity cache popular video files. Files not available from helpers are transmitted by the cellular base station. We analyze the optimum way of assigning files to the helpers, in order to minimize the expected downloading time for files. We distinguish between the uncoded case (where only complete files are stored) and the coded case, where segments of Fountain-encoded versions of the video files are stored at helpers. We show that the uncoded optimum file assignment is NP-hard, and develop a greedy strategy that is provably within a factor 2 of the optimum. Further, for a special case we provide an efficient algorithm achieving a provably better approximation ratio of 1-(1-1 d )d, where d is the maximum number of helpers a user can be connected to. We also show that the coded optimum cache assignment problem is convex that can be further reduced to a linear program. We present numerical results comparing the proposed schemes. We present a high-performance prefetching protocol for the delivery of prerecorded VBR video from a server across a packet-switched network to a large number of clients. Not only does the protocol give constant perceptual quality and almost 100 link utilization, but it also allows for immediate commencement of the video upon user request and near instantaneous response to pause resume and temporal jumps. The protocol requires: (1) that each client have a small amount of memory dedicated to the application; (2) that there is one bottleneck shared link between the server and the clients. Our protocol is based on the observation that there are frequent periods of time during which the shared link's bandwidth is under utilized. During these periods the server can prefetch frames from any of the ongoing videos and can send the frames to the buffers in the appropriate clients. The server chooses prefetched frames according to a join-the-shortest-queue policy. We present simulation results of our prefetch policy that are based on MPEG encoded traces.