Perceived 3D TV Transmission Quality Assessment: Multi-Laboratory Results Using Absolute Category Rating on Quality of Experience Scale

Inspired by the rapidly increasing popularity of 3D movies, there is an industrial push for 3DTV services to the home. One important factor for the success and acceptance by the viewers is a positive quality of experience (QoE) of the new service when delivered. The questions of how to efficiently deliver 3DTV service to the home, and how to evaluate the visual quality perceived by end users are a recent research focus. We have investigated users´ experience of stereoscopic 3D video quality by preparing two subjective assessment datasets. The first dataset aimed at the evaluation of efficient transmission in the transmission error free case, while the second focused on error concealment. A total of three subjective assessments, two for first dataset and one for the second, were performed using the Absolute Category Rating with Hidden unimpaired Reference video (ACR-HR) method. The experimental setup allows to show that the ACR-HR subjective method provides repeatable results across labs and across conditions for video quality. It was also verified that MVC is more efficient than H.264 simulcast coding. Furthermore it was discovered that based on the same level of quality of experience spatial down-sampling may lead to better bitrate efficiency while temporal down-sampling is not acceptable. When network impairments occur, traditional error 2D concealment methods need to be reinvestigated as they were outperformed by displaying the same view for both eyes (switching to 2D presentation).