Unequal Error Protection Aided Region of Interest Aware Wireless Panoramic Video

Panoramic video with its flawless immersive tele-presence is considered to be the near-future video format of choice since they carry 360 degree coverage of the designated scenes. However, the viewers may focus their specific attention on perfectly lip-synchronized video as part of the panoramic video scene, hence only have a peripheral vision of the remaining parts of a frame. Therefore, it is intuitive to allocate stronger protection to the panoramic video region of interest. As a solution, we propose Region of Interest Aware Unequal Error Protection (ROI-UEP) for wireless transmission of high-efficiency video code (HEVC) sequences. Specifically, the ROI of a panoramic frame may be deemed to be within the 120° angular range of the viewing center, which can be estimated from the viewing trajectory of a head mounted display. Then, the most appropriate unequal forward error correction (FEC) coding rates will be found for the ROI signals by minimizing the expected video distortion. Moreover, the so-called weighted peak signal-to-noise ratio (WPSNR) is proposed for evaluating the quality of the reconstructed panoramic video, where the weights of pixels are taken into account for calculating the distortion caused by the related pixels. Our simulation results show that the ROI based equal error protection (ROI-EEP) scheme substantially outperforms the EEP by a WPSNR of more than 10 dB, while the ROI-UEP scheme further improves its ROI-EEP counterpart by a WPSNR of 9.4 dB at a channel E
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of 6 dB.