SR360

Abstract

360-degree videos have gained increasing popularity due to its capability to provide users with immersive viewing experience. Given the limited network bandwidth, it is a common approach to only stream video tiles in the user's Field-of-View (FoV) with high quality. However, it is difficult to perform accurate FoV prediction due to diverse user behaviors and time-varying network conditions. In this paper, we re-design the 360-degree video streaming systems by leveraging the technique of super-resolution (SR). The basic idea of our proposed SR360 framework is to utilize abundant computation resources on the user devices to trade off a reduction of network bandwidth. In the SR360 framework, a video tile with low resolution can be boosted to a video tile with high resolution using SR techniques at the client side. We adopt the theory of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to make a set of decisions jointly, including user FoV prediction, bitrate allocation and SR enhancement. By conducting extensive trace-driven evaluations, we compare the performance of our proposed SR360 with other state-of-the-art methods and the results show that SR360 significantly outperforms other methods by at least 30% on average under different QoE metrics.