Backward Compatible Layered Video Coding for 360° Video Broadcast

Recently, coding of 360 degrees video contents has been investigated in the context of over-the-top streaming services. To be delivered using terrestrial broadcast, it is required to provide backward compatibility of such content to legacy receivers. In this paper, a novel layered coding scheme is proposed to address the delivery of 360 degrees video content over terrestrial broadcast networks. One or several views are extracted from the 360 degrees video and coded as base layers using standard HEVC encoding. Inter-layer reference pictures are built based on projected base-layers and are used in the enhancement layer to encode the 360 degrees video. Experimental results show that the proposed approach provides substantial coding gains of 14.99% compared to simulcast coding and enables limited coding overhead of 5.15% compared to 360 degrees single-layer coding.