Tile-Based Panoramic Video Quality Assessment

Abstract

As part of video transmission, video quality assessment plays an important role in improving the user’s visual quality and reducing transmission bitrate. However, the existing assessment schemes for the tile-based transmission mechanism cannot accurately predict the video quality. In this paper, we propose a tile-based panoramic video quality assessment method to optimize the transmission strategy for tile-based streaming. Considering the distortion of panoramic video projection, the inverse of gnomonic projection and bilinear interpolation are utilized to convert the planar tiles to sphere. Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) is applied to obtain the tile quality score. Besides, the user’s head movement and eye movement are combined to generate a tile weight map, and generate the final score of the panoramic video through weighted averaging. In addition, considering the impact of the quality fluctuation of the tiles within field of view, the tile quality loss model is established from multiple dimensions including the encoding parameter, viewport position and video content. Experimental results show that there is a high correlation between the predicted results and actual subjective scores, under two video quality assessment datasets. Furthermore, we integrate the method into the panoramic video transmission system. Compared with the tile-based adaptive rate algorithm, the proposed method degrades the video quality by only 3%, while reducing the bandwidth consumption by 16.99%.