MFVP: Mobile-Friendly Viewport Prediction for Live 360-Degree Video Streaming

Abstract

Viewport prediction is the crucial task for viewport-adaptive 360-degree video streaming. Various viewport prediction methods are studied and adopted from less accurate statistic tools to highly calibrated deep neural networks. Conventionally, it is difficult to implement sophisticated deep learning methods on mobile devices, which have limited computation capability. In this work, we propose an advanced learning-based viewport prediction approach and carefully design it to introduce minimal transmission and computation overhead for mobile terminals. We further discuss how to integrate this mobile-friendly viewport prediction (MFVP) approach into the adaptive 360-degree video live streaming by formulating and solving the bitrate adaptation problem. Extensive experiment results show that our prediction approach can work in real-time for live streaming and can achieve higher accuracies compared to other existing prediction methods on mobile clients, which, together with our proposed bitrate adaptation algorithm, significantly improves the streaming Quality-of-Experience (QoE) from various aspects.