MTC360: A Multi-Tiles Configuration for Viewport-Dependent 360-Degree Video Streaming

Abstract

360-degree videos are ultra-high-resolution interactive with a look around nature to create an immersive experience for users. The delivery and display to achieve a high quality of experience (QoE), potentially consume excessive network bandwidth. In order to reduce bandwidth use, tile-based adaptive streaming is considered as a promising solution. However, existing heuristic solutions concentrate on fixed tiling schemes to increase the viewport bitrate. In this paper, we propose a multi-tiles configuration for the 360-degree video where the problem is to decide the tiling scheme and resolutions to stream. The proposed approach can systematically determine the size of tiles according to the great circular distance between the original and predicted viewports during each adaptation interval. A non-uniform bitrate is then allocated to the tiles belonging to the viewport and non-viewport regions to improve the QoE performance for 360-degree videos. Experimental results show that the proposed approach can effectively adapt the size and bitrate of the tiles to both user's head movements and varying network conditions. It could handle abrupt head rotations to provide improved viewport quality.