On the impact of packet-loss impairments on visual attention mechanisms

This paper reports the results of a psychometric experiment aimed at investigating the visibility and annoyance of packet-loss artifacts, with a focus on understanding to what extent their presence influences viewing behavior. The rationale behind this study is that packet loss artifacts might “distract” visual attention, creating visual saliency themselves, thereby becoming more visible. In turn, higher artifact visibility might impact their annoyance. Our study involved seven videos, compressed at a very high bitrate (thus free of spatial artifacts), impaired by discarding packets at different packet loss ratios. We tracked the observers´ eye-movements while (1) they assessed the annoyance of impaired videos and (2) looked freely at pristine videos. Our results show that the viewing behavior significantly changes from pristine to impaired videos. This change is related to both properties of the video and to the annoyance of the artifacts presented.