Viewport-Aware Adaptive Encoding for Enhanced 360-degree Video Streaming

Viewport-Aware Adaptive Encoding for Enhanced 360-degree Video Streaming

International Workshop on Multimedia Signal Processing (MMSP)

September 22 – September 24, 2026

Istanbul, Türkiye

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Mahmoud Z. A. Wahba (University of Padova), Mohammad Ghasempour (AAU, Austria), Sara Baldoni (University of Padova), Christian Timmerer (AAU, Austria), Federica Battisti (University of Padova), Hadi Amirpour (AAU, Austria)

Abstract: Streaming 360-degree video content in Virtual Reality (VR) poses significant challenges, particularly in balancing perceived quality and available bandwidth. Tile-based streaming guided by viewport prediction reduces bandwidth usage by allocating a higher bitrate to tiles within the predicted viewport and a lower bitrate to non-viewport tiles. However, viewport prediction is not always precise, and failure cases can significantly degrade the user’s Quality of Experience. In this paper, we address this challenge by selecting the optimal encoding configuration, i.e., the video encoding resolution, for each tile to improve the quality of tiles outside the predicted viewport without increasing the video target bitrate. We evaluate our method on a large-scale 360-degree video dataset, which demonstrates our model effectiveness in improving user-perceived quality, particularly when viewport prediction fails. Our experimental results show a 37.41% improvement in BD-Rate and a 7.5dB gain in BD-PSNR for the viewport-mispredicted tiles.