A 360° Video Adaptive Streaming Scheme Based on Multiple Video Qualities

As an emerging multimedia service, virtual reality (VR) video streaming is facing two challenges: extremely large bandwidth requirements and strict delay requirements. There-fore, improving the utilization of network resources is of great significance to the application and development of VR video in order to provide a better quality of experience. Currently, many VR video streaming solutions are based on 360° video, which is a compromise between restricted bandwidth and streaming delay requirement. For a tile-based 360° video streaming using HTTP2 protocol, the video is split into different tiles with multiple quality levels. In the case of insufficient bandwidth, a limited number of quality levels will lead to large quality differences between adjacent zones, which will also limit the optimization of quality level adaptation, resulting in a lower QoE. In this paper, we propose a new tile-based 360° video adaptive streaming scheme based on multiple video quality levels. The proposed method provides more video quality options/levels, dividing the 360° video into different video zones according to its viewpoint position and assign them with different video quality levels based on bandwidth conditions during the streaming time, to achieve smooth video quality distribution, and ensure high QoE with high video bitrate, low-quality switches and minimized stall time. The experimental results show that the QoE of this proposed method is improved by approximately 28% compared with the existing adaptive 360° video streaming scheme.