SEAWARE: Semantic Aware View Prediction System for 360-degree Video Streaming

Future view prediction for a 360-degree video streaming system is important to save the network bandwidth and improve the Quality of Experience (QoE). Historical view data of a single viewer and multiple viewers have been used for future view prediction. Video semantic information is also useful to predict the viewer's future behavior. However, extracting video semantic information requires powerful computing hardware and large memory space to perform deep learning-based video analysis. It is not a desirable condition for most of client devices, such as small mobile devices or Head Mounted Display (HMD). Therefore, we develop an approach where video semantic analysis is executed on the media server, and the analysis results are shared with clients via the Semantic Flow Descriptor (SFD) and View-Object State Machine (VOSM). SFD and VOSM become new descriptive additions of the Media Presentation Description (MPD) and Spatial Relation Description (SRD) to support 360-degree video streaming. Using the semantic-based approach, we design the Semantic-Aware View Prediction System (SEAWARE) to improve the overall view prediction performance. The evaluation results of 360-degree videos and real HMD view traces show that the SEAWARE system improves the view prediction performance and streams high-quality video with limited network bandwidth.