Backward Compatible Layered Video Coding for 360° Video Broadcast

Recently, coding of 360° video contents has been investigated in the context of over-the-top streaming services. To be delivered using terrestrial broadcast, it is required to provide backward compatibility of such content to legacy receivers. In this paper, a novel layered coding scheme is proposed to address the delivery of 360° video content over terrestrial broadcast networks. One or several views are extracted from the 360° video and coded as base layers using standard HEVC encoding. Inter-layer reference pictures are built based on projected base-layers and are used in the enhancement layer to encode the 360° video. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides substantial coding gains of 14.99% compared to simulcast coding and enables limited coding overhead of 5.15% compared to 360° single-layer coding.