Quality Assessment for Omnidirectional Video with Consideration of Temporal Distortion Variations

Omnidirectional video, also known as 360-degree video, offers an immersive visual experience by providing viewers with an ability to look in all directions within a scene. The quality assessment for omnidirectional video is still a quite difficult task compared to 2D video. As the temporal changes of spatial distortions can considerably influence human visual perception, this paper proposes a full reference objective video quality assessment metric by considering both the spatial characteristics of omnidirectional video and the temporal variation of distortions across frames. Firstly, we construct a spatio–temporal quality assessment unit to evaluate the average distortion in temporal dimension at eye fixation level. The smoothed distortion value is then consolidated by the characteristics of temporal variations. Afterwards, a global quality score of the whole video sequence is produced by pooling. Finally, our experimental results show that our proposed VQA method improves the prediction performance of existing VQA methods for omnidirectional video.