Bandwidth-Efficient Live Virtual Reality Streaming Scheme for Reducing View Adaptation Delay

Abstract

This paper proposes a dynamic-tiling-based bandwidth-efficient (DTBE) virtual reality (VR) streaming scheme. We consider 360-degree VR contents with multiple view points such as the front, back, upper, and bottom sides. At a given time, the focus of a client is always bound to a certain view among multiple view points. By utilizing this perspective, under our proposed scheme, tiles with high encoding rates are selectively assigned to the focused view where multiple view points consist of multiple tiles with different encoding rates. The other tiles with low encoding rates are assigned to the remaining view points. Furthermore, for reducing view adaptation delay, we design a novel rapid view adaptation mechanism that selectively delivers an I-frame during view point updates by using frame indexing. We implement the proposed scheme on a commercial VR test bed where we adopt the MPEG media transport (MMT) standard with high-efficiency video coding (HEVC) tile modes. The measurement-based experiments show that the proposed scheme achieves an average data usage reduction of almost 65.2% as well as average view adaptation delay reduction of almost 57.7%.