Tiling in Interactive Panoramic Video: Approaches and Evaluation

Interactive panoramic systems are currently on the rise. However, one of the major challenges in such a system is the overhead involved in transferring a full-quality panorama to the client when only a part of the panorama is used to extract a virtual view. Thus, such a system should maximize the user experience while simultaneously minimizing the bandwidth required. In this paper, we apply tiling to deliver different quality levels for different parts of the panorama. Tiling has traditionally been applied to the delivery of very high-resolution content to clients. Here, we apply similar ideas in a real-time interactive panoramic video system. A major challenge lies in the movement of such a virtual view, for which clients’ regions of interest change dynamically and independently from each other. We show that our algorithms, which progressively increase in quality toward the point of the view, manage to (i) reduce the bandwidth requirement and (ii) provide a similar quality of experience (QoE) compared to a full panorama system.