SweeTile: Efficient Tiling for 360° Video Streaming on Light-Weight VR Devices
Journal
2023 IEEE International Conference on Communications Workshops: Sustainable Communications for Renaissance, ICC Workshops 2023
ISBN
9798350333077
Date Issued
2023-01-01
Author(s)
Chen, Cheng Yeh
Abstract
Current solutions for tiling in viewport-aware 360° video streaming include fixed tiling and adaptive tiling. Fixed tiling often suffers from tradeoffs between transmission efficiency and encoding efficiency, thus degrading achievable quality of service on the client side. On the other hand, existing adaptive tiling solutions typically require fine-grained and dynamic tiling mechanisms, thus imposing higher computation overhead for both server and client sides. These limitations have thus hindered large-scale deployment of cost-effective 360° streaming systems. In this work, we propose an adaptive tiling mechanism that can effectively improve both encoding and transmission efficiency to facilitate light-weight virtual reality (VR) devices on large-scale 360° video service. We start by motivating the existence of 'sweet spots' for an equirectangular projection (ERP). If a user's viewport falls inside the region of sweet spots, the required bitrate to achieve high visual quality would be relatively small. We thus propose 'SweeTile' to make most viewpoints fall within the coverage of sweet spots by deploying 24 versions of 6\times 3 ERP with various rotations at the video server. Simulation results show that SweeTile improves both the encoding and transmission efficiency by 10% while incurring light computation on the video server and no extra computation on the end users.
Subjects
360° video streaming | adaptive tiling | viewport-aware tiling
Type
conference paper