Characterizing eye movements during temporal and global quality assessment of h.264 compressed video sequences

Abstract

Studies have shown that the deployment of visual attention is closely link to the assessment of image or video quality, though this link is not yet fully understood. The influence of rating temporal quality of compressed videos over the way an observer deploys his attention is investigated in this paper. We set-up a subjective experiment in which the eye movements of observers are recorded during three different tasks: a free-viewing task (FT), a global quality assessment task and a temporal quality assessment task. The FT acts as a reference to which we compare the eye movements during the two other tasks. As previously shown, observers assessing global quality gaze at locations dissimilar to those fixated during the FT. For temporal quality assessment, it seems that the fixated locations are closer to FT than the global quality assessment fixated locations. Our results suggest that the locations observers look at do not depend on the displayed video quality level. Quality however influences the way participants look at videos: the lower the quality, the longer they gaze at a precise location. The area fixated seems to be much smaller during the quality assessment tasks than during the FT for either perfect or poor quality level. The evolution over time of all indicators suggests that, during the first 1 or 2 seconds, the signal properties of the videos are the main attractors for the participants' eye movements. Instructions only seem to play a role afterwards on the deployment of the participants' visual attention.