Assessing the Quality of Experience of 3DTV and Beyond: Tackling the Multidimensional Sensation
Résumé
Quality of experience in 3D media requires new and innovative concepts for subjective assessment methodologies. Capturing the observer’s opinion may be achieved by providing multiple voting scales, such as 2D image quality, depth quantity, and visual comfort. Pooling these different scales to achieve a single quality percept may be performed differently by each human observer. The chapter dives into the complexity of this subject by explaining the QoE concept using 3DTV as an example. It explains the meaning of the different scales, the current approaches to assess each of them, and the individual influence factors related to the voting which affects reproducibility of the obtained results. Methodologies for assessing the overall preference of experience using pair comparisons with a reasonable number of stimuli are provided. The viewers may also create their own attributes for evaluation in the Open Profiling methodology which has been recently adapted for 3DTV. The drawback of all these assessment methods is that they are intrusive in the sense that the assessor needs to concentrate on the task at hand. Medical and psychophysical measurement methods, such as EEG, EOG, EMG, and fMRI, may eliminate this drawback and are introduced with respect to the different QoE influence factors. Their value at this early stage of development is mostly in supporting and partly predicting subjectively perceived and annotated QoE. The chapter closes with a brief review of the most important technical constraints that impact on the capture, transmission, and display of 3DTV signals.