Learned Scanpaths Aid Blind Panoramic Video Quality Assessment
Authors: Kanglong Fan, Wen Wen, Mu Li, Yifan Peng, Kede Ma

Panoramic videos have the advantage of providing an immersive and interactive viewing experience. Nevertheless their spherical nature gives rise to various and uncertain user viewing behaviors which poses significant challenges for panoramic video quality assessment (PVQA). In this work we propose an end-to-end optimized blind PVQA method with explicit modeling of user viewing patterns through visual scanpaths. Our method consists of two modules: a scanpath generator and a quality assessor. The scanpath generator is initially trained to predict future scanpaths by minimizing their expected code length and then jointly optimized with the quality assessor for quality prediction. Our blind PVQA method enables direct quality assessment of panoramic images by treating them as videos composed of identical frames. Experiments on three public panoramic image and video quality datasets encompassing both synthetic and authentic distortions validate the superiority of our blind PVQA model over existing methods.