Panoramic Viewport Prediction Relying on Emotional Attention Map.

Panoramic video is considered to be an attractive video format since it provides the viewers with an immersive experience. However, only the viewers’ focused region of a panoramic video, viewport, is shown on the screen. Numerous applications may benefit from the future viewport prediction, such as the adaptive viewport delivery. Two aspects may be considered for predicting the viewports. Firstly, the viewport trajectory within a time interval is highly correlated, hence the historical viewport trajectory should be utilized. Secondly, the panoramic video content within the viewport highly correlates with human visual attention. In this paper, we propose the Emotional Attention map aided panoramic Viewport Estimation (EAVE) model for predicting the future viewport trajectory. In this model, the historical viewport trajectory and the emotional attention map are jointly exploited by a Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) network. Our experiments show that the proposed method outperforms several baseline methods in terms of prediction accuracy on a panoramic dataset containing viewing trajectory data from 50 viewers for watching 75 panoramic videos.