Spherical domain rate-distortion optimization for 360-degree video coding

Emerging virtual reality (VR) applications bring much challenge to video coding for 360-degree videos. To compress this kind of video, each picture should be projected to a 2D plane (e.g. equirctangular projection map) first, adapting to the input of existing video coding systems. At the display side, an inverse projection is performed before viewport rendering. However, such a project introduces much different levels of distortions depending on the location, which makes the rate-distortion optimization process in video coding much inefficient. In this paper, we consider the distortion in spherical domain and analyse its influence to the rate-distortion optimization process. Then we derive the optimal rate-distortion relationship in spherical domain and present its optimal solution based on HEVC/H.265. Experimental results show that the proposed method can bring up to 11.5% bit-saving compared with the current HEVC/H.265 anchor for 360-degree video coding.