Quality assessment of higher resolution images and videos with remote testing

TU Ilmenau / AVT

The article discusses the use of human-annotated data in multimedia quality assessment and the challenges associated with obtaining such data through lab-based tests. To mitigate the high costs and time consumption of lab-based tests, the article suggests using online tests. The article presents three online tests designed to assess visual quality in high-resolution images and videos using AVrate Voyager. We argue that online tests can be a reliable replacement for lab tests, but with some limitations related to display devices, web technologies, and video codecs and formats.

Steve Göring, Rakesh Rao Ramachandra Rao, Alexander Raake
Quality assessment of higher resolution images and videos with remote testing
Journal Quality and User Experience
DOI 10.1007/s41233-023-00055-6

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Abstract

In many research fields, human-annotated data plays an important role as it is used to accomplish a multitude of tasks. One such example is in the field of multimedia quality assessment where subjective annotations can be used to train or evaluate quality prediction models. Lab-based tests could be one approach to get such quality annotations. They are usually performed in well-defined and controlled environments to ensure high reliability. However, this high reliability comes at a cost of higher time consumption and costs incurred. To mitigate this, crowd or online tests could be used. Usually, online tests cover a wider range of end devices, environmental conditions, or participants, which may have an impact on the ratings. To verify whether such online tests can be used for visual quality assessment, we designed three online tests. These online tests are based on previously conducted lab tests as this enables comparison of the results of both test paradigms. Our focus is on the quality assessment of high-resolution images and videos. The online tests use AVrate Voyager, which is a publicly acces-sible framework for online tests. To transform the lab tests into online tests, dedicated adaptations in the test methodologies are required. The considered modifications are, for example, a patch-based or centre cropping of the images and videos, or a randomly sub-sampling of the to-be-rated stimuli. Based on the analysis of the test results in terms of correlation and SOS analysis it is shown that online tests can be used as a reliable replacement for lab tests albeit with some limitations. These limitations relate to, e.g., lack of appropriate display devices, limitation of web technologies, and modern browsers considering support for different video codecs and formats.