IEEE Trans Haptics. 2021 Apr-Jun;14(2):291-296. doi: 10.1109/TOH.2021.3077191. Epub 2021 Jun 17.
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.
在本文中，我们提出了一种全面的方案，用于通过人类评估者对压缩振动触觉信号进行质量评估。受音频领域中的多刺激测试与隐藏参考和锚点（MUSHRA）的启发，我们设计了一种方法，其中每个压缩信号都与其原始信号进行比较，并在数字量表上进行评分。对于每个测试的信号，使用隐藏参考和两个锚点信号来验证结果并提供评估者筛选标准。与以前的方法不同，我们的方法是分层结构的，并以严格的顺序计时，以避免实验混淆并提供精确的心理物理评估。我们在一项有 20 名参与者的实验中验证了我们的方法，其中我们比较了两种最先进的有损编解码器。结果表明，通过我们的方法，可以有效地比较不同编解码器的性能。此外，该方法还提供了在不同数据压缩率下的主观质量度量。所提出的过程可以轻松地适应评估其他振动触觉编解码器。
