Sophon: Super-Resolution Enhanced 360° Video Streaming with Visual Saliency-aware Prefetch

Jianxin Shi, Lingjun Pu, Xinjing Yuan, Qianyun Gong, Jingdong Xu

Abstract: 360° video streaming requires ultra-high bandwidth to provide an excellent immersive experience. Traditional viewport-aware streaming methods are theoretically effective but unreliable in practice due to the adverse effects of time-varying available bandwidth on the small playback buffer. To this end, we ponder the complementarity between the large buffer-based approach and the viewport-aware strategy for 360°video streaming. In this work, we present Sophon, a buffer-based and neural-enhanced streaming framework, which exploits the double buffer design, super-resolution technique, and viewport-aware strategy to improve user experience. Furthermore, we propose two well-suited ideas: visual saliency-aware prefetch and super-resolution model selection scheme to address the challenges of insufficient computing resources and dynamic user preferences. Correspondingly, we respectively introduce the prefetch and model selection metric, and develop a lightweight buffer occupancy-based prefetch algorithm and a deep reinforcement learning method to trade off bandwidth consumption, computing resource utilization, and content quality enhancement. We implement a prototype of Sophon and extensive evaluations corroborate its superior performance over state-of-the-art works.