On the Stimulation Frequency in SSVEP-based Image Quality Assessment

Steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEP) are brain responses elicited by periodic visual stimuli. Recently it was shown that the use of SSVEP in quality studies allows for accurate psychophysiological assessment of perceived visual quality, but the influence of the stimulation frequency is still unclear. This paper studies experimentally the relation between the SNR of the neural signal and the stimulation frequency in an psychophysiological quality assessment setup. For various source images tested at different distortion magnitudes over the range of 6 different stimulation frequencies, we show physiologically plausible results that provide insights into the temporal dynamics of neural distortion processing. Our findings inform a rational choice of stimulation frequency in SSVEP-based image quality assessment studies. This potentially improves the experimental setup of future image quality assessment studies exploiting the SSVEP paradigm.