Realistic Virtual Reality is supported by 360° video, which provides viewers with an immersive watching experience. However, 360° video is bulky in size, while the transmission system has limited ability to provide bandwidth. As such, intelligent adaptive delivery solutions play a crucial role in enabling users to stream high-quality 360° video. In this research, we propose a novel approach for 360-degree video streaming over HTTP/2 that can provide consumers with a good watching experience (QoE) even in varying network circumstances and head-eye movements over time. The proposed method deploys the so-called BBAG algorithm (Buffer and Bandwidth Allocation Algorithm) using Scalable Video Coding to choose appropriate tile layers to resolve the trade-off between network and user adaptivity. With the support of HTTP/2’s stream termination capability, the delivery of late tile layers is terminated to handle abrupt interruptions. BBAG is proven to improve QoE from 3.56% to 93.71% and the average viewport bitrate from 1.78% to 80.49% compared to state-of-the-art methods.

We have observed a boom in video streaming over the Internet, especially during the Covid-19 pandemic, that could exceed the network resource availability. In addition to upgrading the network infrastructure, finding a way to smartly adapt the streaming system to the network and users’ conditions to satisfy clients’ perceptions is exceptionally critical, too. This paper proposes a new QoE-aware adaptive streaming scheme over HTTP - ABRA - to make flexible adaptations based on the network and the client’s current status. Besides, we propose a technique that can keep the buffer at an average high for more than 10s. We were limiting the phenomena of rebuffering due to unexpected and unpredictable bandwidth changes. The algorithm keeps the quality of subsequent versions at a constant level even when the average bitrate decreases, increasing the QoE. Experimental results show that our method can improve QoE from 7.86% to 20.41% compared to state-of-the-art methods. ABRA can provide better performance in terms of QoE score in all buffer conditions compared to the existing solutions while maintaining a minimum secured buffer level for the worst case.

Non-uniform (foveated) 360° image quality assessment using graph convolution network