OpenSAL360: Open-Source Crowdsourcing Platform for Omnidirectional Video Saliency Collection

Alexey Bryncev, Andrey Moskalenko, Kira Shilovskaya, Ivan Kosmynin, Dmitriy Vatolin

Omnidirectional video saliency prediction plays an important role in many immersive multimedia applications, including viewport-adaptive streaming and compression, foveated rendering, mesh simplification, perceptual quality assessment. Yet progress in this area remains constrained by the cost and complexity of collecting eye-tracking data with VR headsets, which makes large-scale dataset creation difficult to extend. We present OpenSAL360, the first open-source platform for scalable, low-cost 360° video saliency collection. Unlike conventional VR-based protocols, it requires only a standard screen, mouse, and internet connection, enabling parallel saliency data collection from common crowdsourcing assessors without specialized hardware. We validate our collection protocol against seven well-established VR eye-tracking datasets and conduct ablation studies on key interface, pre-, and post-processing parameters. To demonstrate the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed methodology, we collect and publicly release a saliency dataset covering 500 omnidirectional videos annotated by 2,000+ crowdsourcing assessors, making it, to the best of our knowledge, the largest dataset in…