ZTE Communications ›› 2023, Vol. 21 ›› Issue (4): 91-103.DOI: 10.12142/ZTECOM.202304012

• Research Papers • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Beyond Video Quality: Evaluation of Spatial Presence in 360-Degree Videos

ZOU Wenjie1, GU Chengming1, FAN Jiawei1, HUANG Cheng2,3(), BAI Yaxian2,3   

  1. 1.School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University, Xi’an 710071, China
    2.ZTE Corporation, Shenzhen 518057, China
    3.State Key Laboratory of Mobile Network and Mobile Multimedia Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China
  • Received:2023-05-08 Online:2023-12-07 Published:2023-12-07
  • About author:ZOU Wenjie received his BS and PhD degrees from Xidian University, China in 2009 and 2017, respectively. He is currently a lecturer with the Multimedia Communication Laboratory, Xidian University. His research interests include QoE, video quality assessment, and multimedia compression.
    GU Chengming received his BE degree in communication engineering from Xidian University, China in 2021. He is currently working toward an ME degree in information and communication engineering with Xidian University. His research interests include video coding and processing.
    FAN Jiawei received his BE degree in telecommunications engineering from Xidian University, China in 2022. He is currently working toward his ME degree in electronic information with Xidian University. His research interests include video coding and processing.
    HUANG Cheng (huang.cheng5@zte.com.cn) received his MS degree from the School of Computer Science and Engineering, Southeast University, China. He is currently a senior system architect and project manager of video technology research at ZTE Corporation. His research interests include visual coding, storage, transport, and multimedia systems.
    BAI Yaxian received his MS degree in communication engineering from Wuhan University of Technology, China. She is currently a senior engineer at ZTE Corporation. Her research interests include video coding and processing and point cloud compression and transmission.
  • Supported by:
    ZTE Industry?University?Institute Cooperation Funds

Abstract:

With the rapid development of immersive multimedia technologies, 360-degree video services have quickly gained popularity and how to ensure sufficient spatial presence of end users when viewing 360-degree videos becomes a new challenge. In this regard, accurately acquiring users’ sense of spatial presence is of fundamental importance for video service providers to improve their service quality. Unfortunately, there is no efficient evaluation model so far for measuring the sense of spatial presence for 360-degree videos. In this paper, we first design an assessment framework to clarify the influencing factors of spatial presence. Related parameters of 360-degree videos and head-mounted display devices are both considered in this framework. Well-designed subjective experiments are then conducted to investigate the impact of various influencing factors on the sense of presence. Based on the subjective ratings, we propose a spatial presence assessment model that can be easily deployed in 360-degree video applications. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt in literature to establish a quantitative spatial presence assessment model by using technical parameters that are easily extracted. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed model can reliably predict the sense of spatial presence.

Key words: virtual reality, quality assessment, omnidirectional video, spatial presence