Study of the Subjective and Objective Quality of High Motion Live Streaming Videos.

Abstract

Video livestreaming is gaining prevalence among video streaming service s, especially for the delivery of live, high motion content such as sport ing events. The quality of the se livestreaming videos can be adversely affected by any of a wide variety of events, including capture artifacts, and distortions incurred during coding and transmission. High motion content can cause or exacerbate many kinds of distortion, such as motion blur and stutter. Because of this, the development of objective Video Quality Assessment (VQA) algorithms that can predict the perceptual quality of high motion, live streamed videos is greatly desired. Important resources for developing these algorithms are appropriate databases that exemplify the kinds of live streaming video distortions encountered in practice. Towards making progress in this direction, we built a video quality database specifically designed for live streaming VQA research. The new video database is called the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) Livestream Database. The LIVE Livestream Database includes 315 videos of 45 source sequences from 33 original contents impaired by 6 types of distortions. We also performed a subjective quality study using the new database, whereby more than 12,000 human opinions were gathered from 40 subjects. We demonstrate the usefulness of the new resource by performing a holistic evaluation of the performance of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) VQA models. We envision that researchers will find the dataset to be useful for the development, testing, and comparison of future VQA models. The LIVE Livestream database is being made publicly available for these purposes at https://live.ece. utexas.edu/research/LIVE_APV_Study/apv_index.html.