No Arabic abstract
Omnidirectional (or 360-degree) images and videos are emergent signals in many areas such as robotics and virtual/augmented reality. In particular, for virtual reality, they allow an immersive experience in which the user is provided with a 360-degree field of view and can navigate throughout a scene, e.g., through the use of Head Mounted Displays. Since it represents the full 360-degree field of view from one point of the scene, omnidirectional content is naturally represented as spherical visual signals. Current approaches for capturing, processing, delivering, and displaying 360-degree content, however, present many open technical challenges and introduce several types of distortions in these visual signals. Some of the distortions are specific to the nature of 360-degree images, and often different from those encountered in the classical image communication framework. This paper provides a first comprehensive review of the most common visual distortions that alter 360-degree signals undergoing state of the art processing in common applications. While their impact on viewers visual perception and on the immersive experience at large is still unknown ---thus, it stays an open research topic--- this review serves the purpose of identifying the main causes of visual distortions in the end-to-end 360-degree content distribution pipeline. It is essential as a basis for benchmarking different processing techniques, allowing the effective design of new algorithms and applications. It is also necessary to the deployment of proper psychovisual studies to characterise the human perception of these new images in interactive and immersive applications.
Immersive media streaming, especially virtual reality (VR)/360-degree video streaming which is very bandwidth demanding, has become more and more popular due to the rapid growth of the multimedia and networking deployments. To better explore the usage of resource and achieve better quality of experience (QoE) perceived by users, this paper develops an application-layer scheme to jointly exploit the available bandwidth from the LTE and Wi-Fi networks in 360-degree video streaming. This newly proposed scheme and the corresponding solution algorithms utilize the saliency of video, prediction of users view and the status information of users to obtain an optimal association of the users with different Wi-Fi access points (APs) for maximizing the systems utility. Besides, a novel buffer strategy is proposed to mitigate the influence of short-time prediction problem for transmitting 360-degree videos in time-varying networks. The promising performance and low complexity of the proposed scheme and algorithms are validated in simulations with various 360-degree videos.
Video contents have become a critical tool for promoting products in E-commerce. However, the lack of automatic promotional video generation solutions makes large-scale video-based promotion campaigns infeasible. The first step of automatically producing promotional videos is to generate visual storylines, which is to select the building block footage and place them in an appropriate order. This task is related to the subjective viewing experience. It is hitherto performed by human experts and thus, hard to scale. To address this problem, we propose WundtBackpack, an algorithmic approach to generate storylines based on available visual materials, which can be video clips or images. It consists of two main parts, 1) the Learnable Wundt Curve to evaluate the perceived persuasiveness based on the stimulus intensity of a sequence of visual materials, which only requires a small volume of data to train; and 2) a clustering-based backpacking algorithm to generate persuasive sequences of visual materials while considering video length constraints. In this way, the proposed approach provides a dynamic structure to empower artificial intelligence (AI) to organize video footage in order to construct a sequence of visual stimuli with persuasive power. Extensive real-world experiments show that our approach achieves close to 10% higher perceived persuasiveness scores by human testers, and 12.5% higher expected revenue compared to the best performing state-of-the-art approach.
This paper investigates adaptive streaming of one or multiple tiled 360 videos from a multi-antenna base station (BS) to one or multiple single-antenna users, respectively, in a multi-carrier wireless system. We aim to maximize the video quality while keeping rebuffering time small via encoding rate adaptation at each group of pictures (GOP) and transmission adaptation at each (transmission) slot. To capture the impact of field-of-view (FoV) prediction, we consider three cases of FoV viewing probability distributions, i.e., perfect, imperfect, and unknown FoV viewing probability distributions, and use the average total utility, worst average total utility, and worst total utility as the respective performance metrics. In the single-user scenario, we optimize the encoding rates of the tiles, encoding rates of the FoVs, and transmission beamforming vectors for all subcarriers to maximize the total utility in each case. In the multi-user scenario, we adopt rate splitting with successive decoding and optimize the encoding rates of the tiles, encoding rates of the FoVs, rates of the common and private messages, and transmission beamforming vectors for all subcarriers to maximize the total utility in each case. Then, we separate the challenging optimization problem into multiple tractable problems in each scenario. In the single-user scenario, we obtain a globally optimal solution of each problem using transformation techniques and the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions. In the multi-user scenario, we obtain a KKT point of each problem using the concave-convex procedure (CCCP). Finally, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed solutions achieve notable gains over existing schemes in all three cases. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work revealing the impact of FoV prediction on the performance of adaptive streaming of tiled 360 videos.
In this paper, we propose a new interactive compression scheme for omnidirectional images. This requires two characteristics: efficient compression of data, to lower the storage cost, and random access ability to extract part of the compressed stream requested by the user (for reducing the transmission rate). For efficient compression, data needs to be predicted by a series of references that have been pre-defined and compressed. This contrasts with the spirit of random accessibility. We propose a solution for this problem based on incremental codes implemented by rate-adaptive channel codes. This scheme encodes the image while adapting to any user request and leads to an efficient coding that is flexible in extracting data depending on the available information at the decoder. Therefore, only the information that is needed to be displayed at the users side is transmitted during the users request, as if the request was already known at the encoder. The experimental results demonstrate that our coder obtains a better transmission rate than the state-of-the-art tile-based methods at a small cost in storage. Moreover, the transmission rate grows gradually with the size of the request and avoids a staircase effect, which shows the perfect suitability of our coder for interactive transmission.
In this paper, we study the server-side rate adaptation problem for streaming tile-based adaptive 360-degree videos to multiple users who are competing for transmission resources at the network bottleneck. Specifically, we develop a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based viewpoint prediction model to capture the nonlinear relationship between the future and historical viewpoints. A Laplace distribution model is utilized to characterize the probability distribution of the prediction error. Given the predicted viewpoint, we then map the viewport in the spherical space into its corresponding planar projection in the 2-D plane, and further derive the visibility probability of each tile based on the planar projection and the prediction error probability. According to the visibility probability, tiles are classified as viewport, marginal and invisible tiles. The server-side tile rate allocation problem for multiple users is then formulated as a non-linear discrete optimization problem to minimize the overall received video distortion of all users and the quality difference between the viewport and marginal tiles of each user, subject to the transmission capacity constraints and users specific viewport requirements. We develop a steepest descent algorithm to solve this non-linear discrete optimization problem, by initializing the feasible starting point in accordance with the optimal solution of its continuous relaxation. Extensive experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can achieve a near-optimal solution, and outperforms the existing rate adaptation schemes for tile-based adaptive 360-video streaming.