Reducing the network bandwidth requirements for 360 ∘ immersive video streaming

Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality applications are getting increasingly popular and new services are emerging in a diverse set of fields such as entertainment, art, e‐health, and smart factories. 360° videos are an advancement of classical two‐dimensional videos giving the user the impression of being immersed at the center of a scene that can be explored freely and dynamically by simply turning the head to a given region of interest (RoI). Providing a high Quality of Experience to users when streaming 360° videos over the Internet is particularly challenging due to the very high bandwidth requirements. In this letter, a scaling technique to reduce bandwidth requirements to stream omni‐directional videos is presented. An experimental investigation of the proposed approach has shown that it is possible to obtain a reduction of the required bitrate up to around 50% while gracefully degrading visual quality far from the RoI.