Smart streaming of panoramic videos

Abstract

The streaming of panoramic videos comes with a new challenge: adapting the streamed content to user attention. In this paper, by making some abstraction we study the key issues of the problem: (1) online content switching strategies, and (2) offline segmentation in preparation for adaptive streaming. Our work demonstrates how the problem depends fundamentally on user behavior, represented by user attention trajectories. Although we only relied on a typical real-world measured trajectory and two artificially generated benchmark trajectories, we point out how more knowledge of user attention can help optimize both the online and offline strategies.