Perceptual quality measurement for scalable video at low spatial resolution in mobile environments

Abstract

Environments for the delivery and consumption of multimedia are often very heterogeneous, due to the use of various terminals in varying network conditions. One example of such an environment is a wireless network providing connectivity to a plethora of mobile devices. H.264/AVC Scalable Video Coding (SVC) can be utilized to deal with diverse usage environments. However, in order to optimally tailor scalable video content along the temporal, spatial, or perceptual quality axes, a quality metric is needed that reliably models subjective quality. The major contribution of this paper is the development of a novel quality metric for scalable video bit streams having a low spatial resolution, targeting consumption in wireless video applications. The proposed quality metric allows modeling the temporal, spatial, and perceptual quality characteristics of SVC bit streams. This is realized by taking into account several properties of the compressed bit streams, such as the temporal and spatial variation of the video content, the frame rate, and PSNR values. An extensive number of subjective experiments have been conducted to construct and verify the reliability of our quality metric. The experimental results show that the proposed quality metric is able to efficiently reflect subjective quality. Moreover, the performance of the quality metric is uniformly high for video sequences with different temporal and spatial characteristics.