Research carried out by the Distributed and Interactive Systems (DIS) group from Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), in collaboration with international research groups, has resulted in a new standardization item from the International Telecommunication Union (ITU): ITU-T Recommendation P.919, “Subjective test methodologies for 360º video on head-mounted displays."
ITU is a specialized agency of the United Nations, responsible for all matters related to information and communication technologies. Recommendations constitute the main product of the ITU Telecommunication Standardization Sector (ITU-T), and provide standards defining how telecommunication networks operate and interwork. Recommendation ITU-T P.919 describes subjective assessment methods for evaluating quality of experience of short (between 10 s and 30 s) 360º videos. Recommendation ITU-T P.919 also outlines the characteristics of the source sequences to be used, such as duration, type of content and number of sequences.
Quality assessment of 360 º videos
DIS collaborated with international researchers within the Immersive Media Group (IMG) of the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG) to study quality assessment of 360 º videos, participating in a wide, cross-lab experiment involving ten laboratories and more than 300 participants. Audiovisual quality, simulator sickness symptoms, and exploration behavior were evaluated, along with factors' influences such as assessment methodology, sequence duration, Head-Mounted Display (HMD) device, uniform and non-uniform coding degradations, and simulator sickness assessment methods. Besides the ITU-T Recommendations item, the study has resulted in a journal publication in IEEE Transactions of Multimedia.
About the DIS group
DIS actively participates in standardization committees for knowledge valorization. In addition to VQEG and ITU, the group participates in the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG) and the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). For example, in recent years, DIS researchers have contributed to W3C’s Contract for the Web, and have been instrumental in the MPEG work on Point Cloud Compression.
CWI’s DIS research group focuses on facilitating and improving the way people use interactive systems and how people communicate with each other. We combine data science with a strong human-centric, empirical approach to understand the experience of users. This enables us to design and develop next generation intelligent and empathic systems. We base our results on realistic testing grounds and data sets, and embrace areas such as ubiquitous computing, human-centered multimedia systems, and languages.
References
ITU-T P.919 (10/2020). Subjective test methodologies for 360º video on head-mounted displays.
Gutiérrez, Jesús et al. Subjective evaluation of visual quality and simulatorsickness of short 360° videos: ITU-T Rec. P.919. In IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.
