Do video coding impairments disturb the visual attention deployment?

The visual attention deployment in a visual scene is contingent upon a number of factors. The relationship between the observer's attention and the visual quality of the scene is investigated in this paper: can a video artifact disturb the observer's attention? To answer this question, two experiments have been conducted. First, eye-movements of human observers were recorded, while they watched ten video clips of natural scenes under a free-viewing task. These clips were more or less impaired by a video encoding scheme (H.264/AVC). The second experiment relies on the subjective rating of the quality of the video clips. A quality score was then assigned to each clip, indicating the extent to which the impairments were visible. The standardized method double stimulus impairment scale (DSIS) was used, meaning that each observer viewed the original clip followed by its impaired version. Both experimental results have conjointly been analyzed. Our results suggest that video artifacts have no influence on the deployment of visual attention, even though these artifacts have been judged by observers as at least annoying. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.