Institute for Telecommunication Sciences / Research / Quality of Experience / Video Quality Research / Standards / Subjective Testing

Subjective Video Quality Test Standards

The International Telecommunication Union (ITU) creates standards, referred to as “Recommendations,” that describe best practices for performing subjective video quality experiments.

ITU-R Rec. BT.500

“Methodologies for the subjective assessment of the quality of television images”

ITU-R Rec. BT.500 is the oldest of these standards and has been repeatedly updated over the past 60 years. BT.500 is controlled by the Radiocommunication (R) sector's Working Party 6C, which focus on the needs of broadcasters to evaluate broadcast television services. BT.500 emphasizes controlled environment and well-defined experimental methods.

ITU-T Rec. P.910

“Subjective video quality assessment methods for multimedia applications”

ITU-T Rec. P.910 is controlled by the Standardization (T) sector's Study Group 12, which focuses on end-to-end quality measurements for multimedia services: quality of experience (QoE) and quality of service (QoS). P.910 focuses on the needs of researchers to evaluate modern video services (like video streaming) presented on modern devices (including phones, tablets, and laptops).

P.910 emphasizes flexibility of environment, rating scale, display technology, and stimulus modality. This flexibility is needed when examining cutting-edge video services and devices.

ITU-T Rec. P.912

“Subjective video quality assessment methods for recognition tasks”

ITU-T Rec. P.910 analyzes whether or not a video link can be used for a specific task, such as reading license plates or evaluating medical imagery.