On the Impact of Environmental Sound on Perceived Visual Quality

Most of existing visual quality assessment databases are created in controlled conditions where the experimental environments are always kept silent. However, the practical viewing environments often contain diverse environmental sounds. It is our daily experience that different sounds (e.g. chatter, honk and music) can affect our emotions, hence influencing our perceptions of images. So, there is a gap between visual quality under environmental sounds and existing researches of visual quality. Therefore, in this paper, we perform subjective quality evaluations with different types and volumes of environmental sounds. We build a rigorous experimental system to control various conditions of environmental sounds and construct the environmental sound–image database. Afterwards, the influence of environmental sounds on perceived visual quality are analysed from four perspectives: sound categories, sound volumes, distortion levels of images, and image contents.

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