Haptic Dataset Augmentation with Subjective QoE Labels using Conditional Generative Adversarial Network

This paper proposes a novel Generative Adversarial Network (GAN)-based strategy to augment subjective haptic Quality of Experience (QoE) datasets for bilateral teleoperation with haptic feedback without conducting time-consuming subjective experiments. In our previous work, we proposed a multi-assessment fusion approach to predict subjective haptic quality using a collection of objective metrics. This method requires a sufficiently large haptic dataset with QoE labels. The proposed generative approach automatically expands the existing haptic quality dataset by combining a modified conditional GAN (CGAN) and Style GAN (StyleGAN) architecture. The most important feature of our method is that it learns from the labeled training data and focuses on synthesizing signals with artifacts according to new input labels containing the QoE score, time delay, control method, and data reduction information. Extensive experiments are conducted to validate the suitability of the expanded dataset. The results show that our approach is able to generate new data, which match the label and signal distribution of the original data with categorical rank and linear correlation of over 0.85.