Perceptual Quality Assessment for Asymmetrically Distorted Stereoscopic Video by Temporal Binocular Rivalry

In this paper, we propose a two-stage weighting based perceptual quality assessment framework for asymmetrically distorted stereoscopic video (SV) sequences by temporal binocular rivalry. Firstly, a traditional 2D image quality assessment (IQA) method is employed to measure spatial distortion, and the temporal distortion is evaluated by the magnitude differences between motion vectors of distorted and reference video frames. Secondly, the structural strength (SS) computed by gradient map and the motion energy (ME) computed by frame difference map are used to estimate the intensity of visual stimulus in spatial and temporal domain respectively. Then, SS and ME are considered as the importance indexes to combine the quality scores of spatial and temporal distortion to estimate perceived distortion of single-view video sequences, which is denoted as the first-stage weighting. Finally, considering that the difference of intensity of visual stimulus between two eyes results in binocular rivalry, a novel temporal binocular rivalry inspired weighting method is designed to integrate the quality scores of left- and right-views for the final visual quality prediction of SV sequences, which is denoted as the second-stage weighting. Experimental results on Waterloo-IVC SV quality databases show that several specific examples of 2D-IQA methods within the proposed framework can obtain highly competitive performance over other existing ones.