View-Aware 360 Video Streaming Bandwidth Optimization
Find Innovative SolutionsGenerate Solutions
Solution Overview
Problem
360° video streaming faces high bandwidth requirements due to higher bitrates than existing consumer-level wireless networks, leading to pre-downloading and down-sampling, which is undesirable for immersive applications like VR and AR.
Innovation Solution
A system that divides a 360° video stream into regional streams based on viewing orientation, connecting to high-resolution streams for active regions and lower-resolution streams for inactive regions, allowing for efficient rendering and display while minimizing bandwidth usage.
Engineering Contradictions & Design Principles
Engineering Contradiction Analysis
1Manufacturing precision
If 360° video is streamed at high resolution to maintain sharpness in immersive applications, then video quality is improved, but bandwidth requirement increases beyond consumer-level wireless network capabilities
Solution Approach 1:
The 360° video stream is divided into multiple regional streams corresponding to different spatial regions of the viewing volume. Each region can be independently resolved at different quality levels, allowing the system to allocate bandwidth efficiently by providing high resolution only to currently viewed regions while using lower resolution for other regions.
Solution Approach 2:
Different regions of the 360° video are assigned different resolution qualities based on their importance to the current view. The active region containing the viewer's field of view receives high-resolution video data, while inactive regions receive lower-resolution data, optimizing the trade-off between overall video quality and bandwidth consumption.
2Manufacturing precision
If 360° video is pre-downloaded to avoid bandwidth limitations, then video quality is maintained, but storage cost and latency increase
Solution Approach 1:
The system performs preliminary actions by pre-processing the 360° video into multiple regional streams with different resolutions before transmission. This allows the client to quickly retrieve and assemble the necessary regional streams without waiting for complete video downloads, reducing latency while maintaining quality.
Solution Approach 2:
Instead of downloading complete high-resolution video files, the system extracts and transmits only the specific regional streams needed for the current view. This selective extraction approach significantly reduces the amount of data that needs to be downloaded and stored, eliminating the need for full pre-downloading.
3Quantity of substance
If view-aware streaming is implemented to reduce bandwidth usage, then bandwidth requirement is reduced, but computational cost at the streaming server increases significantly
Solution Approach 1:
The video content is segmented into fixed regional streams during pre-processing, which can be independently encoded and transmitted. This segmentation allows the server to simply retrieve and transmit pre-encoded regional streams based on client requests, avoiding the need for complex real-time video processing and reducing computational overhead during streaming operations.
4Quantity of substance
If 360° video is aggressively down-sampled for streaming, then bandwidth requirement is reduced, but video quality deteriorates making it unacceptable for immersive applications
Solution Approach 1:
The system applies different quality levels to different spatial regions of the 360° video based on their relevance to the current view. The active region containing the viewer's field of view is transmitted at high resolution to maintain sharpness and visual quality, while peripheral or inactive regions are transmitted at lower resolutions, optimizing bandwidth usage without sacrificing the quality of the viewed content.
Data Source
AI summary
The present disclosure relates to systems and methods that deliver 360° video streams, which may be used in virtual reality and augmented reality content. Namely, a 360° video stream may be divided into a plurality of video streams, each stream of which corresponds to a portion of a viewing volume or viewing sphere. Additionally, the original 360° video stream may be downsampled to a lower resolution 360° video stream. For a given user view angle, one or more of the plurality of video streams may be considered active streams and connected to a user interface or display for data download. In such a scenario, a user interface may be connected to at least one high resolution video stream that corresponds to the user view angle as well as a low resolution 360° video stream.