Interactive coding of omnidirectional video means that the user is able to choose its viewing orientation at every instant and the transmission system has to take it into account to transmit only what is needed and thus decrease the bandwidth. Doing such an operation without increasing too much the storage burden at the server’s side is not an easy task.

While most existing coders rely on  tiling (i.e., dividing the sphere into small parts encoded and transmitted independently), we have proposed an innovative solution that encodes the entire spherical video altogether and is able, at the same time, to extract only what is needed for transmission to the user. Optimal transmission rate is thus achieved with a minimum storage extra cost.

The Inria ICOV project consists in building an open-source and documented implementation of the proposed coder.