Testing 4K HDR-WCG professional video content for subjective quality using a remote testing approach

Modern content is rapidly shifting from the standard dynamic range (SDR) color volume defined in ITU-R BT.709 towards the high dynamic range and wide color gamut (HDR-WCG) color volume defined in ITU-R BT.2100. For optimizing delivery channels of this content it is crucial to have high performance video quality metrics. However, existing subjective databases used to design and qualify such video quality metrics do not provide adequate test coverage for professional HDR-WCG video content. In this paper we describe a subjective video quality study aimed to be relevant for existing as well as near future HDR-WCG. — Due to the Covid pandemic, the experiment was designed for remote testing, rather than a typical laboratory environment. We carefully analyzed the subjective results and concluded that it is possible to obtain comparable reliability of data in our remote testing environment with a controlled laboratory environment. This opens the door for large-scale video quality testing, enabling continual refinement of video quality metrics, reducing the turn-around time for subjective testing, and eliminating bias in the training data by accessing a much larger and more diverse set of users. — We applied the subjective data set to compare existing image/video quality metrics such as VMAF, HDR-VDP and HDR-VQM. Furthermore, we identified several ways the VMAF metric can be adjusted to improve its accuracy on HDR-WCG content.

Published

2023-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

High Dynamic Range, Visual Quality metric, Subjective study, Contrast Sensitive Function

DOI

10.5594/M002001

ISBN

978-1-61482-964-5