Subjective and objective quality assessment of panoramic videos in virtual reality environments

With the maturity of virtual reality (VR) technology, people have been able to acquire virtual reality experience lightly. To discover more appropriate encoder for panoramic video encoding with the aim of ameliorating the quality of virtual reality video experience, this paper conducts the experiments of subjective and objective quality assessment of panoramic videos. First, sixteen standard panoramic videos are processed by using three encoders and inputting noise to set up a panoramic video database which comprises 384 videos. Second, in term of appraising several subjective methods and proposing a novel subjective methodology, subjective quality evaluation test on all panoramic video sequences' perception is conducted. Finally, this paper exhibits the objective experimental results using the existing objective metrics, and the performance of these metrics are evaluated according to the subjective test data, with the aim of discovering a superior objective metric to evaluate encoder for panoramic videos.