Subjective and objective evaluation of HDR video coding technologies

Abstract

This paper reports the details and results of a subjective and objective quality evaluation assessing responses to an MPEG call for evidence (CfE) on high dynamic range (HDR) and wide color gamut video coding. Five HDR video contents, compressed at four bit rates by each proponent responding to the CfE, were used in the subjective assessments. To be able to evaluate the performance of objective quality metrics, the double stimulus impairment scale (DSIS) method was used for subjective assessments instead of previously published paired comparison to an anchor. Subjective results show evidence that coding efficiency can be improved in a statistically noticeable way over the HEVC anchor in terms of perceived quality. However, when compared to paired comparison, less statistically significant differences are observed because of the lower discrimination power of the DSIS method. The collected subjective scores were used as a ground truth to benchmark and analyze the performance of objective metrics. Results show that HDR-VDP-2 and PQ2VIFP have the highest correlation with subjective scores and outperform other investigated metrics.