Abstract-In the near future, many conventional video applications are likely to be replaced by immersive video to provide a sense of "being there". This transition is facilitated by the recent advancement of 3-D (3-Dimensional) capture, coding, transmission, and display technologies. Stereoscopic video is the simplest form of 3-D video available in the literature. "Colour plus depth map" based stereoscopic video has attracted significant attention, as it can reduce storage and bandwidth requirements for the transmission of stereoscopic content over communication channels. However, quality assessment of coded video sequences can currently only be performed reliably using expensive and inconvenient subjective tests. To enable researchers to optimize 3-D video systems in a timely fashion, it is essential that reliable objective measures are found. This paper investigates the correlation between subjective and objective evaluation of colour plus depth video. The investigation is conducted for different compression ratios, and different video sequences. Transmission over IP (Internet Protocol) is also investigated. Subjective tests are performed to determine the image quality and depth perception of a range of differently coded video sequences, with packet loss rates ranging from 0% to 20%. The subjective results are used to determine more accurate objective quality assessment metrics for 3-D colour plus depth video.

Abstract-A novel fully comprehensive mobile video communications system is proposed in this paper. This system exploits the useful rate management features of the video transcoders and combines them with error resilience for transmissions of coded video streams over general packet radio service (GPRS) mobileaccess networks. The error-resilient video transcoding operation takes place at a centralized point, referred to as a video proxy, which provides the necessary output transmission rates with the required amount of robustness. With the use of this proposed algorithm, error resilience can be added to an already compressed video stream at an intermediate stage at the edge of two or more different networks through two resilience schemes, namely the adaptive intra refresh (AIR) and feedback control signaling (FCS) methods. Both resilience tools impose an output rate increase which can also be prevented with the proposed novel technique in this paper. Thus, an error-resilient video transcoding scheme is presented to give robust video outputs at near target transmission rates that only require the same number of GPRS timeslots as the nonresilient schemes. Moreover, an ultimate robustness is also accomplished with the combination of the two resilience algorithms at the video proxy. Extensive computer simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system. Index Terms-Error-resilient video proxy, GPRS mobile-access networks, mobile video communications, MPEG-4 video standard, video transcoding.

The timely deployment of 3-D video applications requires accurate objective quality measures, so that time consuming subjective tests can be avoided.Investigates is the correlation between subjective and objective evaluations of colour plus depth map 3-D video. The investigation is conducted for different compression ratios. Subjective tests are performed to determine the overall image quality and depth perception of a range of asymmetrically coded video sequences. The subjective results are used to determine more accurate objective quality assessment metrics for colour plus depth map based stereoscopic video.

Abstract-Stereoscopic imaging is becoming increasingly popular. However, to ensure the best quality of experience, there is a need to develop more robust and accurate objective metrics for stereoscopic content quality assessment. Existing stereoscopic image and video metrics are either extensions of conventional 2D metrics (with added depth or disparity information) or are based on relatively simple perceptual models. Consequently, they tend to lack the accuracy and robustness required for stereoscopic content quality assessment. This paper introduces full-reference stereoscopic image and video quality metrics based on a Human Visual System (HVS) model incorporating important physiological findings on binocular vision. The proposed approach is based on the following three contributions. First, it introduces a novel HVS model extending previous models to include the phenomena of binocular suppression and recurrent excitation. Second, an image quality metric based on the novel HVS model is proposed. Finally, an optimised temporal pooling strategy is introduced to extend the metric to the video domain. Both image and video quality metrics are obtained via a training procedure to establish a relationship between subjective scores and objective measures of the HVS model. The metrics are evaluated using publicly available stereoscopic image/video databases as well as a new stereoscopic video database. An extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the robustness of the proposed quality metrics. This indicates a considerable improvement with respect to the state-of-the-art with average correlations with subjective scores of 0.86 for the proposed stereoscopic image metric and 0.89 and 0.91 for the proposed stereoscopic video metrics.

Stereoscopic video is one of the simplest forms of multi view video, which can be easily adapted for communication applications. Much current research is based on colour and depth map stereoscopic video, due to its reduced bandwidth requirements and backward compatibility. Existing immersive media research is more focused on application processing than aspects related to transfer of immersive content over communication channels. As video over packet networks is affected by missing frames, caused by packet loss, this paper proposes a frame concealment method for colour and depth map based stereoscopic video. The proposed method exploits the motion correlation of colour and depth map image sequences. The colour motion information is reused for prediction during depth map coding. The redundant motion information is then used to conceal transmission errors at the decoder. The experimental results show that the proposed frame concealment scheme performs better than applying error concealment for colour and depth map video separately in a range of packet error conditions.

Background: Global positioning system (GPS) based player movement tracking data are widely used by professional football (soccer) clubs and academies to provide insight into activity demands during training and competitive matches. However, the use of movement tracking data to inform the design of training programmes is still an open research question. Objectives: The objective of this study is to analyse player tracking data to understand activity level differences between training and match sessions, with respect to different playing positions. Methods: This study analyses the per-session summary of historical movement data collected through GPS tracking to profile high-speed running activity as well as distance covered during training sessions as a whole and competitive matches. We utilise 20,913 data points collected from 53 football players aged between 18 and 23 at an elite football academy across four full seasons (2014–2018). Through ANOVA analysis and probability distribution analysis, we compare the activity demands, measured by the number of high-speed runs, the amount of high-speed distance, and distance covered by players in key playing positions, such as Central Midfielders, Full Backs, and Centre Forwards. Results and Implications: While there are significant positional differences in physical activity demands during competitive matches, the physical activity levels during training sessions do not show positional variations. In matches, the Centre Forwards face the highest demand for High Speed Runs (HSRs), compared to Central Midfielders and Full Backs. However, on average the Central Midfielders tend to cover more distance than Centre Forwards and Full Backs. An increase in high-speed work demand in matches and training over the past four seasons, also shown by a gradual change in the extreme values of high-speed running activity, was also found. This large-scale, longitudinal study makes an important contribution to the literature, providing novel insights from an elite performance environment about the relationship between player activity levels during training and match play, and how these vary by playing position.

Abstract-It is well known that when the two eyes are provided with two views of different resolutions the overall perception is dominated by the high resolution view. This property, known as binocular suppression, is effectively used to reduce the bit rate required for stereoscopic video delivery, where one view of the stereo pair is encoded at a much lower quality than the other. There have been significant amount of effort in the recent past to measure the just noticeable level of asymmetry between the two views, where asymmetry is achieved by encoding views at two quantization levels. However, encoding artifacts introduce both blurring and blocking artifacts in to the stereo views, which are perceived differently by the human visual system. Therefore, in this paper, we design a set of psycho-physical experiments to measure the just noticeable level of asymmetric blur at various spatial frequencies, luminance contrasts and orientations. The subjective results suggest that humans could tolerate a significant amount of asymmetry introduced by blur, and the level of tolerance is independent of the spatial frequency or luminance contrast. Furthermore, the results of this paper illustrate that when asymmetry is introduced by unequal quantization, the just noticeable level of asymmetry is driven by the blocking artifacts. In general, stereoscopic asymmetry introduced by way of asymmetric blurring is preferred over asymmetric compression. It is expected that the subjective results of this paper will have important use cases in objective measurement of stereoscopic video quality and asymmetric compression and processing of stereoscopic video.

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