ClusTile: Toward Minimizing Bandwidth in 360-degree Video Streaming

360-degree video has the potential to transform the video streaming experience by providing a more-immersive environment for users to interact with than standard streaming video. This experience is hampered, however, by high bandwidth requirements resulting from the extra information associated with the 360-degree frames. Because users cannot see this full 360-degree view, but the full view is transmitted in the majority of 360-degree streaming systems, there is much potential to reduce wasted bandwidth in this domain. We propose ClusTile, a tiling approach formulated to select a set of tiles that allows minimal bandwidth needed to be used when streaming 360-degree video over an expected set of views. These tiles are selected by solving a set of integer linear programs (ILPs) independently on clusters of collected user views. The clustering approach reduces computation requirements of the ILPs to practical levels. Tilings computed from ClusTile can save up to 76% bandwidth compared to standard 360-degree streaming and up to 52% bandwidth compared to best-performing fixed tiling schemes.