Measuring quality of experience for 360-degree videos in virtual reality
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. RESEARCH PAPER .
October 2020, Vol. 63 202301:1–202301:15 https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-2734-y
Measuring quality of experience for 360-degree videos in virtual reality Muhammad Shahid ANWAR1 , Jing WANG1* , Asad ULLAH1 , Wahab KHAN1 , Sadique AHMAD2 & Zesong FEI1 1
School of Information and Electronics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing 100081, China; 2 Faculty of Engineering Sciences and Technology, Iqra University, Karachi 75500, Pakistan
Received 18 July 2019/Revised 24 September 2019/Accepted 15 November 2019/Published online 19 August 2020
Abstract In recent years, we witness dramatic growing attention in immersive media technologies like 360degree videos and virtual reality (VR). However, measuring the quality-of-experience (QoE) for 360-degree VR videos is not a trivial task. Streaming such videos to head mounted displays (HMDs) is extremely bandwidth-demanding when compared to traditional 2D videos. In HTTP adaptive streaming, QoE tends to deteriorate significantly during fluctuating network conditions, which results in various bitrate changes and causes multiple stalling events during playback. Thus, understanding how the human visual system perceives 360-degree video with the effect of stalling and different bitrate levels becomes inevitable. In this paper, we investigate the impact of stalling on users QoE under different bitrate levels and the interaction between stalling event and bitrate level for 360-degree videos in VR. To aim this, we first build a 360-degree videos database by encoding videos in three different bitrate levels (1, 5, and 15 Mbps) with 4K resolutions (3840 × 1920 pixels). We then simulate various stalling events in the videos and conduct a subjective experiment in a virtual reality environment to investigate the human responses. Finally, we use a Bayesian method to estimate and predict the QoE while measuring the quality drop owing to various stalling events and bitrate changes. Proposed solution and prediction results show a strong dependency between playback stalling and bitrate of 360-degree video in VR. Stalling always impacts the QoE of 360-degree videos, but the strength of this negative impact depends on the video bitrate level. The adverse effect of stalling events is more profound when bitrate level approaches to the high and low end, which is in close agreement with subjective opinion. Keywords
quality of experience, stalling, virtual reality, 360-degree video
Citation Anwar M S, Wang J, Ullah A, et al. Measuring quality of experience for 360-degree videos in virtual reality. Sci China Inf Sci, 2020, 63(10): 202301, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11432-019-2734-y
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Introduction
Virtual reality (VR) applications have attracted substantial attention because of their fully immersive experiences. The 360-degree video watched in VR head-mounted displays (HMDs) is required to be transmitted with acceptable quality, bitrate, and lower delay for guaranteeing better quality-of-experience (QoE). Drastic development in VR has led service providers (e.g., YouTube and
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