Revision as of 15:03, 21 January 2015

VQEGPlayer

Description

VQEGPlayer is a software for performing subjective video quality experiments for Windows 7 in 64bit. More recent versions may work with adaptations.

It is designed to present a video on a computer screen synchronized with the refresh signal of the display to allow for perfectly repeatable output if the PC system allows for sufficient performance. This is implemented using DirectX. It will also handle the interaction with the user to collect the quality ratings and randomization of the presentation orders of the video clips. Audio playback is not yet supported.

It was originally written by Kjell Brunnström, Acreo Swedish ICT AB, and released as freeware under the name of AcrVQWin (www.acreo.se/acrvqwin) (Jonsson and Brunnström, 2007) after it was used as the video quality experiment playback software in the VQEG Multimedia project(VQEG, 2008). This was at the time the largest subjective test ever undertaken by VQEG, involving 13 organizations that performed subjective testing for the test and in total 41 subjective experiments. These 41 subjective experiments included 5320 processed video sequences and were evaluated by 984 viewers. The software proved to be very stable and very few problems were reported. This version implemented the standardized procedure Absolute Category Rating (ACR)(ITU-T, 1999).

Later it has been further developed by Acreo and by IRCCyN, (Institut de Recherche en Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes) at the University of Nantes for various purposes e.g. 3D TV and Paired Comparison experiments using standalone and remote interfaces. It is now a versatile software for subjective video quality experiments. As such it has been used in various subjective experiments including the “Coding and Spatial Degradations” (COSPAD) and the “Ground Truth Quality of Experience 3D 1” (GroTruQoE3D1) experiment of VQEG’s 3DTV group.

License

The software is released with the license of GPL v3 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html)

Download

Due to time constraints, only a limited version is made available as source code. Please get in contact if you want to contribute to this project, you are welcome!

The source code can be downloaded here.

Compilation

To compile the software use Visual Studio 2008 or later. Please note that you need MFC support which the community/express editions are missing.

• 1. Choose New -> Project from existing code
• a. Choose VC++
• b. Add project folder (subfolders can be excluded for simplicity) and choose project name
• c. Tick “Add support for MFC”
• d. Click Finish
• 2. In Project properties > Configuration > General, set character set to Unicode character set
• 3. Download and build boost library for 64 bit according to the included instructions. (Only the regex library is needed)
• 4. Download and install DX SDK of June 2010.
• 5. Add the libraries in Include Directories and Library Directories in
• 6. Project properties > Configuration > VC++ Directories
• 7. In Project properties > Linker > Input, add strmbase.lib and dinput8.lib from win sdk
• 8. In Project properties > Linker > Command Line, add /force:multiple
• 9. Build the project.

Contact

Please send comments and requests to the Joint Effort Group Mailing list.

Authors

The following people made significant contributions to the playback tool:

• Kjell Brunnström (Acreo Swedish ICT AB)
• Romain Cousseau (IRCCyN / University of Nantes)
• Jimmy Jonsson (Acreo Swedish ICT AB)
• Yao Koudota (IRCCyN / University of Nantes)
• Vladimir Bagazov ((IRCCyN / University of Nantes)
• Marcus Barkowsky (IRCCyN / University of Nantes)

Acknowledgement

The work at Acreo Swedish ICT AB was supported by VINNOVA (Sweden's innovation agency) and EIT ICT Labs, which is hereby gratefully acknowledged. References

At IRCCyN / University of Nantes, the development was supported by the ITEA2 Project JEDI ( Just Explore DImensions) and by the UHD4U project both supported by the French industry ministery through DGCIS.

References

• ITU-T, (1999). Subjective video quality assessment methods for multimedia applications, (ITU-T Rec. P.910), International Telecommunication Union, Telecommunication standardization sector,
• Jonsson, J. and Brunnström, K., (2007). Getting started with ArcVQWin, (acr022250), Acreo AB, Kista, Sweden.
• VQEG, (2008). Final report from the Video Quality Experts Group on the validation of objective models of multimedia quality assessment, phase I, (VQEG Final Report of MM Phase I Validation Test), Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG),