International recommendations for subjective video quality assessment (e.g., ITU-R BT.500-11) include specifications for how to perform many different types of subjective tests. In addition to displaying the video sequences in different ways, subjective tests also have different rating scales, different words associated with these scales, and many other test variables that change from one laboratory to another (e.g., viewer expertise and criticality, cultural differences, physical test environments). Thus, it is very difficult to directly compare or combine results from two or more subjective experiments. The ability to compare and combine results from multiple subjective experiments would greatly benefit developers and users of video technology since standardized subjective data bases could be expanded upon to include new source material and past measurement results could be related to newer measurement results. This paper presents a subjective method and an objective method for comb...
Margaret H. Pinson, Stephen Wolf