ATHENA Christian Doppler (CD) Laboratory

Tile-based Streaming of 8K Omnidirectional Video: Subjective and Objective QoE Evaluation

https://www.qomex2019.de/

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Raimund Schatz (AIT Austrian Institute of Technology), Anatoliy Zabrovskiy (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt), Christian Timmerer (Alpen-Adria Universität Klagenfurt)

Abstract: Omnidirectional video (ODV) streaming applications are becoming increasingly popular. They enable a highly immersive experience as the user can freely choose her/his field of view within the 360-degree environment. Current deployments are fairly simple but viewport-agnostic which inevitably results in high storage/bandwidth requirements and low Quality of Experience (QoE). A promising solution is referred to as tile- based streaming which allows to have higher quality within the user’s viewport while quality outside the user’s viewport could be lower. However, empirical QoE assessment studies in this domain are still rare. Thus, this paper investigates the impact of different tile-based streaming approaches and configurations on the QoE of ODV. We present the results of a lab-based subjective evaluation in which participants evaluated 8K omnidirectional video QoE as influenced by different (i) tile-based streaming approaches (full vs. partial delivery), (ii) content types (static vs. moving camera), and (iii) tile encoding quality levels determined by different quantization parameters. Our experimental setup is characterized by high reproducibility since relevant media delivery aspects (including the user’s head movements and dynamic tile quality adaptation) are already rendered into the respective processed video sequences. Additionally, we performed a complementary objective evaluation of the different test sequences focusing on bandwidth efficiency and objective quality metrics. The results are presented in this paper and discussed in detail which confirm that tile-based streaming of ODV improves visual quality while reducing bandwidth requirements.

Index Terms: Omnidirectional Video, Tile-based Streaming, Subjective Testing, Objective Metrics, Quality of Experience

Acknowledgment: This work was supported in part by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (FFG) under the Next Generation Video Streaming project “PROMETHEUS”.

In my most recent blog post I wrote about “mobile data traffic report and forecast 2017-2022” based on white papers/reports from Sandvine and Cisco.

The short summary is as follows: Sandvine reports that in total around 42% is video (compared to almost 58% in the global report from October 2018) while Cisco reports that mobile video traffic accounted for 59% of total mobile data traffic in 2017 and predicts that nearly 79% of the world’s mobile data traffic will be video by 2022, it will increase 9-fold between 2017 and 2022.

Further details are available here and ATHENA is expected to address current and upcoming challenges in this area. Interested how? Please see about page and consider applying for a job!

This is the Web site of Christian Doppler (CD) Pilot Laboratory ATHENA
“Adaptive Streaming over HTTP and Emerging Networked Multimedia Services”.

The project will start in 2019 and for further details, please see the about page as well as open jobs.