Retina-based quality assessment of tile-coded 360-degree videos

Abstract

Nowadays, omnidirectional content, which delivers 360-degree views of scenes, is a significant aspect of Virtual Reality systems. While 360 video requires a lot of bandwidth, users only see visible tiles, therefore a large amount of bitrate can be saved without affecting the user’s experience on the service. This fact has led to current video adaptation solutions filtering out superfluous parts and unnecessary bandwidth. To establish a solid foundation for these adaptations, it is essential to understand human video quality perception. In our research, we contribute by constructing an effective omnidirectional video database designed to study the effects on the five zones of the human retina. Additionally, we propose a new video quality assessment method to analyze the impacts of these zones on 360-degree video based on human retinal characteristics. Our proposed scheme demonstrates superior performance over 22 existing objective quality measures, achieving improvements ranging from 11% to 31% in terms of the PCC parameter.