Modelling saliency awareness for objective video quality assessment

Existing video quality metrics do usually not take into consideration that spatial regions in video frames are of varying saliency and thus, differently attract the viewer's attention. This paper proposes a model of saliency awareness to complement existing video quality metrics, with the aim to improve the agreement of objectively predicted quality with subjectively rated quality. For this purpose, we conducted a subjective experiment in which human observers rated the annoyance of videos with transmission distortions appearing either in a salient region or in a non-salient region. The mean opinion scores confirm that distortions in salient regions are perceived much more annoying. It is shown that application of the saliency awareness model to two video quality metrics considerably improves their quality prediction performance.