Reducing the network bandwidth requirements for 360∘ immersive video streaming

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality applications are getting increasingly popularand new services are emerging in a diverse set of fields such as entertainment,art, e-health, and smart factories. 360◦videos are an advancement of classicaltwo-dimensional videos giving the user the impression of being immersed at thecenter of a scene that can be explored freely and dynamically by simply turning thehead to a given region of interest (RoI). Providing a high Quality of Experience tousers when streaming 360◦videos over the Internet is particularly challenging dueto the very high bandwidth requirements. In this letter, a scaling technique to reducebandwidth requirements to stream omni-directional videos is presented. An experi-mental investigation of the proposed approach has shown that it is possible to obtain areduction of the required bitrate up to around 50% while gracefully degrading visualquality far from the RoI.