HDR or SDR? A Subjective and Objective Study of Scaled and Compressed Videos
This work addresses video quality assessment for HDR and SDR content, which is important for optimizing scaling and compression in media production and streaming, but is incremental as it builds on existing quality models.
The study investigated human perceptual quality judgments of HDR and SDR videos under scaling and compression, finding that preference depends on display device, resolution, and bitrate, with over 23,000 ratings collected. It also developed a novel no-reference model, HDRPatchMAX, which outperforms existing metrics in accuracy.
We conducted a large-scale study of human perceptual quality judgments of High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos subjected to scaling and compression levels and viewed on three different display devices. HDR videos are able to present wider color gamuts, better contrasts, and brighter whites and darker blacks than SDR videos. While conventional expectations are that HDR quality is better than SDR quality, we have found subject preference of HDR versus SDR depends heavily on the display device, as well as on resolution scaling and bitrate. To study this question, we collected more than 23,000 quality ratings from 67 volunteers who watched 356 videos on OLED, QLED, and LCD televisions. Since it is of interest to be able to measure the quality of videos under these scenarios, e.g. to inform decisions regarding scaling, compression, and SDR vs HDR, we tested several well-known full-reference and no-reference video quality models on the new database. Towards advancing progress on this problem, we also developed a novel no-reference model called HDRPatchMAX, that uses both classical and bit-depth sensitive distortion statistics more accurately than existing metrics.