Effect of content features on short-term video quality in the visual periphery

Abstract

The area outside our central field of vision, also referred to as the visual periphery, captures most information in a visual scene, although much less sensitive than the central Fovea. Vision studies in the past have stated that there is reduced sensitivity of texture, color, motion and flicker (temporal harmonic) perception in this area, that bears an interesting application in the domain of quality perception. In this work, we particularly analyze the perceived subjective quality of videos containing H.264/AVC transmission impairments, incident at various degrees of retinal eccentricities of observers. We relate the perceived drop in quality, to five basic types of features that are important from a perceptive standpoint: texture, color, flicker, motion trajectory distortions and also the semantic importance of the underlying regions. We are able to observe that the perceived drop in quality across the visual periphery, is closely related to the Cortical Magnification fall-off characteristics of the V1 cortical region. Additionally, we see that while object importance and low frequency spatial distortions are important indicators of quality in the central foveal region, temporal flicker and color distortions are the most important determinants of quality in the periphery. We therefore conclude that, although users are more forgiving of distortions they viewed peripherally, they are nevertheless not totally blind towards it: the effects of flicker and color distortions being particularly important.