A Low-Complexity Video Encoder for Equirectangular Projected 360 Video Content

360- video is gaining a lot of interest because of the immersive feeling brought by such a technology. Several projection formats are used to represent this type of content. Equirectangular projection (ERP) is one of the most widely used projection scheme for 360 panoramic content. The main drawback of ERP is its latitude dependent sampling density unlike conventional 2D content. Consequently, conventional 2D codecs such as HEVC are not optimal for the coding of ERP projected 360 content. To cope with this dependency, this work proposes an adaptation of motion vector resolution and minimum width of the coding block depending on its latitude. Experimental results show up to 0.5% BD-rate savings for motion contained sequences with 15% encoding time reduction in random access configuration.