Transferring adaptive bit rate streaming quality models from H.264/HD to H.265/4K-UHD

Abstract

In this paper the quality of adaptive bit rate video streaming is investigated and two state-of-the-art models, i.e., the NTT audiovisual quality-estimation and ITU-T P.1203 models, are considered. This paper shows how these models can be applied to new conditions, e.g., 4K ultra high definition (4K-UHD) videos encoded using H.265, considering that they were originally designed and trained for HD videos encoded with H.264. Six subjective evaluations involving up to 192 participants and a large variety of test conditions, e.g., durations from 10 sec to 3 min, coding-quality variation, and stalling events, were conducted on both TV and mobile devices. Using the subjective data, this paper addresses how models and coefficients can be transferred to new conditions. A comparison between state-of-the-art models is conducted, showing the performance of transferred and retrained models. It is found that other video-quality estimation models, such as VMAF, can be used as input of the NTT and ITU-T P.1203 long-term pooling modules, allowing these other video-quality-estimation models to support the specificities of adaptive bit-rate-streaming scenarios. Finally, all retrained coefficients are detailed in this paper allowing future work to directly reuse the results of this study.