VQEG column: VQEG meeting Dec. 2020 (virtual/online)

Abstract

Welcome to the third column on the ACM SIGMM Records from the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG). The last VQEG plenary meeting took place online from 14 to 18 December. Given the current circumstances, it was organized all online for the second time, with multiple sessions distributed over five to six hours each day allowing remote participation of people from different time zones. About 130 participants from 24 different countries registered to the meeting and could attend the several presentations and discussions that took place in all working groups. This column provides an overview of this meeting, while all the information, minutes, files (including the presented slides), and video recordings from the meeting are available online in the VQEG meeting website. As highlights of interest for the SIGMM community, apart from several interesting presentations of state-of-the-art works, relevant contributions to ITU recommendations related to multimedia quality assessment were reported from various groups (e.g., on adaptive bitrate streaming services, on subjective quality assessment of 360-degree videos, on statistical analysis of quality assessments, on gaming applications, etc.), the new group on quality assessment for health applications was launched, and an interesting session on 5G use cases took place, as well as a workshop dedicated to user testing during Covid-19. In addition, new efforts have been launched related to the research on quality metrics for live media streaming applications, and to provide guidelines on implementing objective video quality metrics (ahead of PSNR) to the video compression community. We encourage those readers interested in any of the activities going on in the working groups to check their websites and subscribe to the corresponding reflectors, to follow them and get involved.