Interactive panoramic video streaming system over restricted bandwidth network

Many new applications are being created around the panoramic video service. The typical system divides the high resolution panoramic video into tiles and the sender transmits a set of tiles, the partial panoramic video. Coding each tile at a uniform bitrate yields poor video quality because each tile has different visual characteristics. This paper proposes a new data format and tile adaptive rate control to achieve high quality partial panoramic video transmission, even over restricted bandwidth networks. The proposed data format, based on the MVC standard, has two types of video stream and meta data. Each tile is encoded at multiple bitrates and multiplexed synchronously. The meta data has quality values of each tile at the multi-bitrates, and is used to determine the view_ids associated with the bitrates and user's desired view. Our tile-adaptive rate control proposal maximizes the partial panoramic video quality even in restricted bandwidth networks. An experiment shows that the proposed method can achieve higher video quality. The method ensures that the facial elements in the user's view, which often exhibit the greatest motion and to which we are most sensitive, have high quality.