Exploring Parallelism Using Vertical Tiles in VVC Encoder for 360-Degree Videos

Abstract

The Versatile Video Coding (VVC) standard achieves significant improvements in compression efficiency over its predecessors but at the cost of increased computational complexity. This challenge becomes even more critical in immersive media applications, such as 360-degree video, where high resolutions and projection formats intensify encoding demands. In this work, we explore the use of vertical tiles as a parallelization strategy within the VVC encoder for 360-degree video content. Experimental results, conducted on standard test sequences, show that vertical tile partitioning achieves notable speedup compared to conventional square and horizontal tiles, with gains of up to 65%. Importantly, these performance improvements are obtained with minimal impact on coding efficiency, as indicated by BD-Rate variations below 0.5%. The findings highlight vertical tiles as an effective approach to mitigate the high computational cost of 360-degree video encoding under VVC, providing a promising direction for future research on adaptive tiling and parallelism in immersive video applications.