Saliency-aware Bullet Comment for Virtual Reality Video

Bullet comment, known as ’’Barrage", is a popular function in online video streaming applications. It refers to time-anchored comments that are directly displayed on top of the video. The comments generally contain audiences’ feedback and feeling of the current video scene. Bullet comments are now well-developed for 2D video and applied to famous video streaming websites such as Bili-Bili in China and Niconico in Japan. Previous study [13] discovered that the traditional 2D planar display method is not suitable for 360° videos comparing to the 3D spherical display method. Although spherical display method can provide a higher level of immersive experience to audiences, due to the FoV limitation of VR head-mounted devices, many bullet comments may be omitted by audiences if they are out of audiences’ FoV. Hence, we propose a saliency-aware bullet comment framework for comment insertion to 360° video. We first predict the saliency map for the input video and then insert the comments with overlapping avoidance. According to the experimental results obtained, the proposed framework demonstrates the effectiveness of saliency-aware bullet comments.