H.264 BASED CODING OF OMNIDIRECTIONAL VIDEO
Ingo Bauermann, Matthias Mielke, Eckehard G. Steinbach · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2006
Abstract Omnidirectional video is an adequate image-based scene representation data format for interactive walkthroughs or surround viewing of a scene over the Internet. While efficient compression is a key issue in this context, the properties of omnidirectional video are not in line with the assumptions that are made about video sequences by modern compression standards like MPEG-4 AVC/H.264. We introduce a preprocessing approach which transforms omnidirectional video into a sequence of panoramic images before encoding. Using a state of the art MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 video coder, our approach performs up to 2dB better for low bit rates compared to regular encoding of omnidirectional video.