Video Streaming with Interactive Pan/Tilt/Zoom High-Quality Visual Experience

High-spatial-resolution videos offer the possibility of viewing an arbitrary region-of-interest (RoI) interactively. The user can pan/tilt/zoom while watching the video. This chapter presents spatial-random-access-enabled video compression that encodes the content such that arbitrary RoIs corresponding to different zoom factors can be extracted from the compressed bit-stream. The chapter also covers RoI trajectory prediction, which allows pre-fetching relevant content in a streaming scenario. The more accurate the prediction the lower is the percentage of missing pixels. RoI prediction techniques can perform better by adapting according to the video content in addition to simply extrapolating previous moves of the input device. Finally, the chapter presents a streaming system that employs application-layer peer-to-peer (P2P) multicast while still allowing the users to freely choose individual RoIs. The P2P overlay adapts on-the-fly for exploiting the commonalities in the peers’ RoIs. This enables peers to relay data to each other in real-time, thus drastically reducing the bandwidth required from dedicated servers.