Perceptual annotation of local distortions in videos: tools and datasets

To assess the quality of multimedia content, create datasets, and train objective quality metrics, one needs to collect subjective opinions from annotators. Different subjective methodologies exist, from direct rating with single or double stimuli to indirect rating with pairwise comparisons. Triplet and quadruplet-based comparisons are a type of indirect rating. From these comparisons and preferences on stimuli, we can place the assessed stimuli on a perceptual scale (e.g., from low to high quality). Maximum Likelihood Difference Scaling (MLDS) solver is one of these algorithms working with triplets and quadruplets. A participant is asked to compare intervals inside pairs of stimuli: (a,b) and (c,d), where a,b,c,d are stimuli forming a quadruplet. However, one limitation is that the perceptual scales retrieved from stimuli of different contents are usually not comparable. We previously offered a solution to measure the inter-content scale of multiple contents. This paper presents an open-source python implementation of the method and demonstrates its use on three datasets collected in an in-lab environment. We compared the accuracy and effectiveness of the method using pairwise, triplet, and quadruplet for intra-content annotations. The code is available here: https://github.com/andreaspastor/MLDS_inter_content_scaling.