Viewport proposal CNN for 360° video quality assessment

Recent years have witnessed the growing interest in visual quality assessment (VQA) for 360° video. Unfortunately, the existing VQA approaches do not consider the facts that: 1) Observers only see viewports of 360° video, rather than patches or whole 360° frames. 2) Within the viewport, only salient regions can be perceived by observers with high resolution. Thus, this paper proposes a viewport-based convolutional neural network (V-CNN) approach for VQA on 360° video, considering both auxiliary tasks of viewport proposal and viewport saliency prediction. Our V-CNN approach is composed of two stages, i.e., viewport proposal and VQA. In the first stage, the viewport proposal network (VP-net) is developed to yield several potential viewports, seen as the first auxiliary task. In the second stage, a viewport quality network (VQ-net) is designed to rate the VQA score for each proposed viewport, in which the saliency map of the viewport is predicted and then utilized in VQA score rating. Consequently, another auxiliary task of viewport saliency prediction can be achieved. More importantly, the main task of VQA on 360° video can be accomplished via integrating the VQA scores of all viewports. The experiments validate the effectiveness of our V-CNN approach in significantly advancing the state-of-the-art performance of VQA on 360° video. In addition, our approach achieves comparable performance in two auxiliary tasks. The code of our V-CNN approach is available at https://github.com/Archer-Tatsu/V-CNN.