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Abstract Today, the demand for and interest in virtual reality (VR) is increasing, since we can now easily experience VR in many applications. However, the computational ability of mobile VR is limited compared to that of tethered VR. Since VR represents a 360-degree area, providing high quality only for the area viewed by the user saves considerable bandwidth. Therefore, we propose a new tile-based streaming method that transforms 360-degree videos into mobile VR using high efficiency video coding (HEVC) and the scalability extension of HEVC (SHVC). While the SHVC base layer (BL) represents the entire picture, the enhancement layer (EL) can transmit only the desired tiles by applying the proposed method. By transmitting the BL and EL using region of interest (ROI) tiles, the proposed method helps reduce not only the computational complexity on the decoder side but also the network bandwidth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Error concealment (EC) is essential for a video transmission system over the error prone networks. However, it is very difficult to find the best EC method among many EC methods without the original pictures. This is the limitation of the EC method that only works at a video decoder side. Thus, this paper proposes a new method that signals best EC mode(s) which is calculated and determined at an encoder side to a decoder. When the experiments were conducted, gains in video quality vary from 0.2 to 2.5 dB in PSNR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

360-degree video streaming for high-quality virtual reality (VR) is challenging for current wireless systems because of the huge bandwidth it requires. However, millimeter wave (mmWave) communications in the 60 GHz band has gained considerable interest from the industry and academia because it promises gigabit wireless connectivity in the huge unlicensed bandwidth (i.e., up to 7 GHz). This massive unlicensed bandwidth offers great potential for addressing the demand for 360-degree video streaming. This paper investigates the problem of 360-degree video streaming for mobile VR using the SHVC, the scalable of High-Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard and PC offloading over 60 GHz networks. We present a conceptual architecture based on advanced tiled-SHVC and mmWave communications. This architecture comprises two main parts. (1) Tile-based SHVC for 360-degree video streaming and optimizing parallel decoding. (2) Personal Computer (PC) offloading mechanism for transmitting uncompressed video (viewport only). The experimental results show that our tiled extractor method reduces the bandwidth required for 360-degree video streaming by more than 47% and the tile partitioning mechanism was improved by up to 25% in terms of the decoding time. The PC offloading mechanism was also successful in offloading 360-degree decoded (or viewport only) video to mobile devices using mmWave communication and the proposed transmission schemes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]