A Delay Compensation Approach for Pan-Tilt-Unit-based Stereoscopic 360° Telepresence Systems Using Head Motion Prediction

The acceptance of teleoperation applications like tele-driving, tele-surgery, tele-maintenance, etc., is challenged by the quality-reducing effect of end-to-end latency. Particularly, when users wear Head-Mounted Displays to enhance the immersive experience, the lag between head motion and display response leads to unbearable motion sickness, indisposition, and, in the worst case, abortion of the teleoperation session. In this paper, we propose a delay compensation approach with head motion prediction that can be applied to pan-tilt-unit-based stereoscopic telepresence systems. We provide the user with the impression of a 3D 360° video that represents the remote scene without noticing the present delay, even when rotating the head. To this end, we propose a novel prediction paradigm for head motion estimation to substantially mitigate the negative impact of the latency on the quality of experience. We re-implemented state-of-the-art head movement predictors and compare them to our proposed approach by means of qualitative measures. In our experiments, we used two real and independent head motion datasets for validation and tested communication delays between 100-1000ms. Our results show that mean compensation rates of more than 99% are able with our approach.