VCX-Forum e.V

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VCX-Forum e.V

VCX logo
Type	Independent Foundation under civil law
ISIN	🆔
Founded 📆	2017 in Köln, Germany
Founder 👔
Headquarters 🏙️	Kerpen, Germany
Area served 🗺️	Global
Members
Number of employees
🌐 Website	vcx-forum.org
📇 Address
📞 telephone

VCX-Forum (where VCX is an acronym for Valued Camera eXperience) is an independent non-governmental standard-setting organisation for image quality measurement and benchmarking (VCX-Score).. Its members are drawn from Mobile phone manufacturers, Mobile operators, Imaging labs, Mobile and computer Chipset manufacturers, Sensor manufacturers, device manufacturers, software companies, equipment providers and camera and accessory manufacturers among others. The Forum produces benchmarks - VCX scores.

VCX Scores are used by specialist media and by its members. to not only showcase the benchmarking of the end products like smartphones but also to market components that are part of the photography system of a device. For example, an official member's promotion

History

VCX-Forum was registered on 10 July 2017 as a not-for-profit standard-setting organisation. Its registered office is in Kerpen Germany.

The history can be traced back to the early 1990s when the ISO technical committee began to develop standards for how to measure the quality and performance of digital cameras. In 1997, Image Engineering, one of the ISO committee members and Vodafone conducted digital camera tests for quality assessments. In 2013, as part of the new Vodafone-internal project, Vodafone and Image-Engineering developed a new method of evaluating the camera quality of smartphones from the user's perspective. This evaluation method was a combination of new quality parameters based on the latest technology (to 2013). This included testing smartphones in various lighting conditions that the smartphone cameras are typically used under.

The development continued for a few years and the companies decided to open the methodology to a wider audience. This culminated in founding a standard-setting organisation registered as a not for profit in 2017. The objective was/is to involve the smartphone industry and come up with an open and transparent standard for benchmarking smartphone cameras.

In early 2018 the paper titled "VCX: An industry initiative to create an objective camera module evaluation for mobile devices" was presented with the "best paper" award at the IS&T International Symposium on Electronic Imaging Science and Technology, Burlingame, California

Membership and governance

Full membership of the VCX-Forum is open to organisations who/which are interested in furthering the image quality measurement standard. Honorary memberships are open to well-known experts and universities who are willing to contribute to the development of the standard. Approximately 23 such organisations are full members of the VCX-Forum.

The VCX-Forum is broadly organised into 4 groups.

1. The board which manages the strategic and technical direction of the organisation.
2. Standards group which has the mandate to update the standards for VCX. The standards group is further divided into profile groups. Each profile develops the standards for that specific profile. Currently, there are 2 profiles defined – Smartphone and Webcam
3. Lab-Authority which translates the standards to process and procedures for the labs as well as has the remit of auditing and maintaining the consistency between labs.
4. Marketing group has the remit of Public relationships, publications and communication

The board is elected by members at a general meeting held every alternate year. The VCX-Forum board has 7 representatives from Mobile operators, mobile phone manufacturers, chipset manufacturers and Imaging labs. Profile leads automatically become part of the board.

Dietmar Wuller has served as the President of the organisation from its inception. He was re-elected in 2021 for a third term ending in 2023.

VCX-Forum's annual operating budget is funded by membership dues and fees, Surcharge (testing), audit services rendered by VCX-Forum Trusted labs (VFTL) and publication licences for VCX Score.

• Current members of the VCX-Forum are:

AAC technologies, Dell, Instituto de Pesquisas Eldorado, Fairphone, Google, HP, Huawei, Image Engineering, Imatest, Intel, Lenovo, MediaTek, Microsoft, Motorola, Nomicam, Oppo, PAL acoustics, Qualcomm, Realtek, Samsung, TCL, Vivo, Vodafone, Xiaomi, Carl Zeiss, Cisco.

• Some member companies who do not wish to disclose their membership in VCX-Forum have been omitted from the list

Events

The VCX-Forum's Imaging conference is held annually and is usually hosted by one of its members. The event was first held in 2015 and hosted by Vodafone.

• 2017 March The first conference: Vodafone, Düsseldorf
• 2018 June: Cupertino
• 2018 September: Image Engineering, Köln
• 2019 February: Huawei, Shanghai
• 2019 June: Nomicam, Tampere
• 2019 November: LG Electronics, Seoul
• From 2020 till now: Online conference due to the Covid-19 pandemic

Tenets

VCX testing and scoring methodologies are based on the 5 tenets

• VCX test measurements shall ensure the out-of-the-box experience
• VCX shall remain 100% objective
• VCX shall remain open and transparent
• VCX shall employ /use an independent imaging lab for testing
• VCX shall seek continuous improvement

VCX-Score methodology

Parameters

To ensure the results are as close to the end-user experience as possible. The image quality is evaluated for five parameters.

• Spatial Resolution
• Texture loss – the ability of the device to reproduce low contrast, fine details
• Sharpening – the ability of the device to sharpen with minimum disturbing artifacts
• Noise – ability of the device to suppress noise without obfuscating too many details
• Dynamic range – ability of the device to capture maximum contrast in a scene
• Color Reproduction – the ability of the device to capture colours as close to the original scene

Setup

• The device under test is mounted on a tripod on rails to keep the reproduction scale constant and consistent between devices under test
• The entire lab is temperature-controlled to standard room temperature (23°C ± 2°C)
• The device under test is expected to
  1. reproduce reflective test targets like the "TE42-LL" (TE42-LL target in A1066 and A 460 (Selfie) in 4:3 and 16:9);
  2. reproduce transmissive TE269B test target (for dynamic range measurements)
  3. reproduce test charts while mounted on a hand simulation device ( A device used to simulate the shake that the human hand to measure the shake reduction apparatus of the device. The simulation is based on the ISO 20954-2)
• the device under test is then used to capture a series of images and Video in various controlled lighting conditions

A detailed description of the setup and procedure is available as a whitepaper at the VCX-Forum website

Test result publication

Testing results on the website

VCX-Forum's website has all the scores of the results with star-based rate, as well as current news, test environment, procedure and the information of the latest test version. To check the standard details, anyone can request the white paper through the website.

Criticism

Metrics and weighting

VCX-Forum claims that all test measurements must ensure the out-of-the-box experience (Tenet 1 of VCX-Forum) but does not specify what happens when the devices are updated later on

VCX-Forum claims to be objective (Tenet 2 of VCX-Forum) but uses subjective components for the formation of the weighting itself. This subjectivity base is claimed to have come from blind tests for which no evidence has been provided on the website

Despite the claim that VCX is an open and transparent standard (tenet 3 of VCX-forum), the details of weighting and scoring are only visible to formal members of the VCX Forum

Most measurements are done with the device on a tripod (refer to VCX white paper) and aimed at test charts, this does not reflect the common user scenario that VCX claims to reflect.

Organisation

VCX-Forum trusted labs are mandated to be inherently independent. This restricts any lab which is funded or partially funded (>5%) by any stakeholder in the ODM/OEM impossible.

To become a VCX-Forum Trusted lab, a prospective lab has to maintain continuous operations for 2 years which offers a clear advantage to incumbents

Currently, there are only 2 VCX-Forum trusted labs and both of them are in Europe.

VCX-Forum allows some of its members to remain anonymous despite claiming to be an open forum. Not all members are listed on their websites.

External links

• Official website

This article "VCX Forum" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical and/or the page Edithistory:VCX Forum. Articles copied from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be seen on the Draft Namespace of Wikipedia and not main one.

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