Video Quality Estimation for Mobile H.264/AVC Video Streaming

Abstract

The scope of this paper is the estimation of subjective video quality for low-resolution video sequences as they are typical for mobile video streaming. Although the video quality experienced by users depends on spatial (edges, colors, ...) and more considerably on temporal (movement speed, direction, ...) features of the video sequence, most of the well-known methods are based on spatial features. This paper presents a new reference-free approach for quality estimation based on motion characteristics. The character of motion is determined by the amount and direction of the motion between two scene changes. In this paper, two methods are presented. The first method, presents the design of a quality metric based on content adaptive parameters, allowing for content dependent video quality estimation. The second method estimates video quality in two steps. Firstly, the content classification with character sensitive parameters is carried out. Finally, based on the content class, frame rate and bitrate, the video quality is estimated. The performance of the proposed methods is evaluated and compared to the ANSI T1.801.03 metric. The results show that the motion-based approach provides powerful means of estimating the video quality experienced by users for low resolution video streaming services.