Peer-to-peer multicast live video streaming with interactive virtual pan/tilt/zoom functionality

Video streaming with virtual pan/tilt/zoom functionality allows the viewer to watch arbitrary regions of a high-spatial-resolution scene. In our proposed system, the user controls his region-of-interest (ROI) interactively during the streaming session. The relevant portion of the scene is rendered on his screen immediately. An additional thumbnail overview aids his navigation. We design a peer-to-peer (P2P) multicast live video streaming system to provide the control of interactive region-of-interest (IROI) to large populations of viewers while exploiting the overlap of ROIs for efficient and scalable delivery. Our P2P overlay is altered on-the-fly in a distributed manner with the changing ROIs of the peers. The main challenges for such a system are posed by the stringent latency constraint, the churn in the ROIs of peers and the limited bandwidth at the server hosting the IROI video session. Experimental results with a network simulator indicate that the delivered quality is close to that of an alternative traditional unicast client-server delivery mechanism yet requiring less uplink capacity at the server.