An objective assessment method based on multi-level factors for panoramic videos

With the development of Virtual Reality (VR) technology, single-viewpoint videos have been replaced by the multi-sviewpoint panoramic video owing to the fact that the latter brings people more immersive experiences. To improve the quality of experience (QoE) of panoramic videos, the video quality assessment (VQA) method need to be investigated. However the design of the quality metric for panoramic videos is a more complicated and harder problem, since users' feelings are affected by more psychological and physiological factors. Traditional VQA methods cannot evaluate the quality of panoramic videos accurately. In this paper, we propose a general objective full-reference quality assessment method for panoramic videos. The proposed method is based on multi-level quality factors, which are calculated with region of interest (ROI) maps. The framework is flexible and expandable, and its objective output has a higher correlation with subjective scores than that of traditional VQA methods and existing panoramic video evaluation methods.