ITU-R BT.500-15 (05/2023) is the broadcast-television companion to ITU-T P.910, governing subjective assessment of television picture quality and organized into three parts: overall requirements and when to use which method, the methodologies themselves, and format-specific guidance. It is the home of DSIS (the broadcast name for DCR), the Double Stimulus Continuous Quality Scale (DSCQS), single-stimulus methods, stimulus-comparison (pair comparison), and the continuous-evaluation methods SSCQE and SDSCE. It also owns the canonical viewing-condition rules the multimedia world borrows - peak luminance 70-500 cd/m2, a background at about 0.15 of peak, around 200 lux in a home environment, display calibration with a PLUGE pattern, and viewing distance in picture heights. Its execution machinery is widely used: the at-least-fifteen-observer figure and the informal label, the roughly thirty-minute session limit, the five discarded stabilizing presentations, and the kurtosis-based observer-rejection procedure. When a paper cites BT.500 it is usually for the viewing setup or the DSCQS/DSIS method. Note P.910 now supersedes BT.500's 15-subject figure for multimedia tests.
The handbook · 7 volumes
Fora Soft Video Engineering Handbook
ITU-R BT.500 sets the viewing conditions and methods behind most lab subjective tests, and results that ignore it are hard to defend. We wrote seven volumes covering the whole video stack, and for BT.500 start with Volume 1: subjective scores, DSIS and DSCQS-style methods, quality metrics and the codec impairments under test. Written by Nikolay Sapunov, CEO at Fora Soft.
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