Sight Guidance Enhanced VR Video Transmission

This paper studies the enhancement of the tile-based multicasting transmission for virtual reality (VR) panoramic videos. A sight guidance scheme is proposed to aggregate the viewpoints of users, so as to increase the opportunity of multicasting and reduce the traffic load. Aimed at minimizing the weighted sum of average traffic load and users’ watching preference derivation, we formulate a target guidance viewpoint optimization problem, and propose an approximate gradient descent algorithm to find a solution. Simulation results based on a real VR video dataset demonstrate the benefits brought by sight guidance, and show that compared with some heuristic sight guidance methods, the proposed algorithm has significant advantages in reducing traffic load and maintaining users’ watching preference.