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Over the past decade, the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has grown significantly due to their agility, maneuverability, and rapid deployability. An important application is the use of UAV-mounted 360-degree cameras for real-time streaming of Omnidirectional Videos (ODVs), enabling immersive experiences with up to six Degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) for applications like remote surveillance and gaming. However, streaming high-resolution ODVs with low latency (below 1 second) over an air-to-ground (A2G) wireless channel faces challenges due to its inherent non-stationarity, impacting the Quality-of-experience (QoE). Limited onboard energy availability and energy consumption variability based on flight parameters add to the complexity. This paper conducts a thorough survey of challenges and research efforts in UAV-based immersive video streaming. First, we outline the end-to-end 360-degree video transmission pipeline, covering coding, packaging, and streaming with a focus on standardization for device and service interoperability. Next, we review the research on optimizing video streaming over UAV-to-ground wireless channels, and present a real testbed demonstrating 360-degree video streaming from a UAV with remote control over a 5G network. To assess performance, a high-resolution 360-degree video dataset captured from UAVs under different conditions is introduced. Encoding schemes like AVC/H.264, HEVC/H.265, VVC/H.266, VP9, and AV1 are evaluated for encoding latency and QoE. Results show that HEVC‘s hardware implementation achieves a good QoE-latency trade-off, while AV1’s software implementation provides superior QoE. The paper concludes with discussions on open challenges and future directions for efficient and low-latency immersive video streaming via UAVs.
Sharma et al. (Mon,) studied this question.