The quality assessment related to 'digital humans' proposed by domestic researchers has been finally approved as an international standard by the International Organization for Standardization, and expectations are high that quality assessments for various services will be possible in the future.

The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) announced on the 24th that the quality assessment framework related to digital humans proposed by the research team at a meeting hosted by the International Organization for Standardization in late June was finally approved as an international standard.

Digital human is a technology that analyzes a person's physical structure and movements into data and reproduces the movements in a virtual space as if they were a real person.

It is possible to have an emotional conversation with realistic facial expressions and human emotions just like a person.

ETRI proposed a standard framework, including a Question List and an Evaluation Method, to evaluate the quality of digital humans.

The standard framework proposed by the research team can be applied to various services such as games, videos, and extended reality (XR) as well as digital humans by changing the question list.

The research team explained that the reason why the question list can be applied to various services by changing it like this is because they separated the question list and the evaluation method and applied a method to add questions that fit the application field.
br /> This technology was developed as a result of the project of the Ministry of Science and ICT (Information and Communication Planning and Evaluation Institute) titled ‘Development of realistic-level digital human creation and 30fps-level realistic rendering technology.’

ETRI announced that through this project, it was possible to use artificial intelligence technology to change awkward digital human videos rendered in low to medium quality to a level that humans cannot distinguish between them.

It is a high-precision digital 3D human creation technology with realism and functionality.

By using the technology established as this international standard, it will be possible to officially score and evaluate the quality of domestic and foreign digital humans.

This will enable formal service provision and answers to requirements regarding the number of digital humans needed in related industries.

This means that customized supply is possible according to the demand of digital humans.

ETRI CG/Vision Lab Principal Researcher Seung-Wook Lee said, “Through this standard, we can also evaluate the quality of various contents recently created by generative AI. We expect that in the future, through industry-led forums, etc., we will be able to provide digital human quality scores tailored to each application service, thereby improving the content quality of the entire digital human industry.”

ETRI Jeong Il-kwon, head of the Content Research Division, also said, “Recently, ETRI has been making great efforts to strengthen fact standardization activities. He said, “This achievement is the result of the research team’s efforts to strengthen technology development linkage and fact standardization activities, and we will strive to apply the quality assessment framework to various fields in the future.”

The international standard established by the ETRI research team this time was established by the Digital Human Group (IEEE 3079.3) under the IEEE 3079 human factors technology group.

This standard was first proposed as a standard item at the IEEE 3079 conference in July 2021 by ETRI Senior Researcher Seung-Wook Lee.

It was later adopted as a standard project by SASB of IEEE-SA in December 2021 and was finally approved as an international standard in June.