Perceptual Quality of Audio-Visual Content with Common Video and Audio Degradations

Abstract

Audio-visual quality assessment remains as a complex research field. A great effort is being made to understand how visual and auditory domains are integrated and processed by humans. In this work, we analyzed and compared the results of three psychophisical experiments that collected quality and content scores given by a pool of subjects. The experiments include diverse content audio-visual material, e.g., Sports, TV Commercials, Interviews, Music, Documentaries and Cartoons, impaired with several visual (bitrate compression, packet-loss, and frame-freezing) and auditory (background noise, echo, clip, chop) distortions. Each experiment explores a particular domain. In Experiment 1, the video component was degraded with visual artifacts, meanwhile, the audio component did not suffer any type of degradation. In Experiment 2, the audio component was degraded while the video component remained untouched. Finally, in Experiment 3 both audio and video components were degraded. As expected, results confirmed a dominance of the visual component in the overall audio-visual quality. However, a detailed analysis showed that, for certain types of audio distortions, the audio component played a more important role in the construction of the overall perceived quality.