Tile based panoramic streaming using shifted IDR representations

Panoramic streaming enables users to interactively navigate through high-spatial resolution videos and create an immersive and personalized user experience. Since transmission of high-resolution videos in desirable quality is not feasible given the limited throughput of access and home network links, our work is based on tile-based streaming, where only a spatial subset of the video is transmitted. In this paper, we propose a highly responsive DASH client algorithm that allows users to rapidly change the set of downloaded tiles. The high responsiveness is achieved by using small buffers, which are usually very sensitive to variations of throughput and instantaneous media bitrate and are therefore prone to playback interruptions. The proposed rate adaptation algorithm for DASH, in combination with a peak bitrate reducing RAP configuration referred to as shifted IDRs, outperforms the state of the art rate adaptation algorithms. Experiments report a decreased number of playback interruptions and quality changes while maintaining the average video quality.