Perceptual quality assessment of compressed vibrotactile signals through comparative judgment

Evelyn Muschter, Andreas Noll, Jinting Zhao, Rania Hassen, Matti Strese, Basak Gulecyuz, Shu Chen Li, Eckehard Steinbach

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

20 Scopus citations

Abstract

In this article, we present a comprehensive scheme for the quality assessment of compressed vibrotactile signals with human assessors. Inspired by the multiple stimulus test with hidden reference and anchors (MUSHRA) from the audio domain, we designed a method in which each compressed signal is compared to its original signal and rated on a numerical scale. For each signal tested, the hidden reference and two anchor signals are used to validate the results and provide assessor screening criteria. Differing from previous approaches, our method is hierarchically structured and strictly timed in a sequential manner to avoid experimental confounds and provide precise psychophysical assessments. We validated our method in an experiment with 20 human participants in which we compared two state-of-the-art lossy codecs. The results show that, with our approach, the performance of different codecs can be compared effectively. Furthermore, the method also provides a measure of subjective quality at different data compression rates. The proposed procedure can be easily adapted to evaluate other vibrotactile codecs.

Original languageEnglish
Article number9422196
Pages (from-to)291-296
Number of pages6
JournalIEEE Transactions on Haptics
Volume14
Issue number2
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Apr 2021

Keywords

  • Subjective quality assessment
  • Tactile perception
  • Vibrotactile compression
  • Vibrotactile quality assessment

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