The Effect of Spatio-temporal Inconsistency on the Subjective Quality Evaluation of Omnidirectional Videos

• Published in: ICASSP 2019 - 2019 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) pp. 4055 - 4059
• Main Authors: Zhang, Wei, Zou, Wenjie, Yang, Fuzheng, Leveque, Lucie, Liu, Hantao
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2019
• Subjects: Observers; Omnidirectional video; Quality assessment; Reliability; spatio-temporal inconsistency; subjective quality; Trajectory; Videos; viewing mode; Visualization
• ISSN: 2379-190X
• DOI: 10.1109/ICASSP.2019.8682221

With the development of immersive media technologies, omnidirectional video services have been launched in many fields. Conducting subjective quality evaluation research becomes a crucial step to benchmark and ensure the quality of omnidirectional video services. As omnidirectional videos record spherical visual scenes that are broader than the visual field of human eyes, the quality scores rated by different observers are based on individual spatio-temporal viewing experience. The potential spatio-temporal inconsistency between observers may impact the reliability of subjective quality evaluation and thus challenge existing experimental methodologies. In this paper, we focus on investigating the effect of spatial-temporal inconsistency on the subjective quality evaluation of omnidirectional videos. A systematic quality evaluation experiment was designed with various viewing methods involved. Experimental results showed that the spatio-temporal inconsistency has a significant impact on the reliability of subjective quality results and the impact is strongly determined by the viewing method. We intend to provide recommendations with respect to the subjective quality evaluation of omnidirectional videos.