Subjective quality evaluation VIA paired comparison: Application to scalable video coding

Jong Seok Lee, Francesca De Simone, Touradj Ebrahimi

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

85 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Scalable video coding is a powerful solution for content delivery in many interactive multimedia services due to its adaptability to varying terminal and network constraints. In order to successfully exploit such adaptability, it is necessary to understand users' preference among various scalability options and consequently develop an optimal bit rate adaptation strategy. In this paper, we present a study of subjective quality assessment of scalable video coding, which investigates the influence of the combination of scalability options on perceived quality with the goal of providing guidelines for an adaptive strategy that selects the optimal combination for a given bandwidth constraint. In particular, the study is based on paired comparison of stimuli that is suitable for our goal due to its simplicity and easiness. We propose a new method, called Paired Evaluation via Analysis of Reliability (PEAR), which analyzes paired comparison results and produces not only quality scores but also intuitive measures of confidence of the scores for significance analysis. Results and analysis of extensive subjective tests for two different scalable video codecs and high definition contents are described, from which general consistent conclusions are drawn. The video and subjective data used in the paper are publicly available to the research community.

Original languageEnglish
Article number5772009
Pages (from-to)882-893
Number of pages12
JournalIEEE Transactions on Multimedia
Volume13
Issue number5
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2011 Oct

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Manuscript received September 01, 2010; revised February 28, 2011; accepted May 09, 2011. Date of publication May 23, 2011; date of current version September 16, 2011. This work was supported in part by the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2011) under grant agreement no. 216444 (PetaMedia), and in part by the Swiss NCCR Interactive Multimodal Information Management (IM2). The associate editor coordinating the review of this manuscript and approving it for publication was Dr. Jin Li.

All Science Journal Classification (ASJC) codes

  • Signal Processing
  • Media Technology
  • Computer Science Applications
  • Electrical and Electronic Engineering

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