Measuring Video Quality on Full Scalability of H.264/AVC Scalable Video Coding

In heterogeneous network environments, it is mandatory to measure the grade of the video quality in order to guarantee the optimal quality of the video streaming service. Quality of Service (QoS) has become a key issue for service acceptability and user satisfaction. Although there have been many recent works regarding video quality, most of them have been limited to measuring quality within temporal and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) scalability. H.264/AVC Scalable Video Coding (SVC) has emerged and has been developed to support full scalability. This includes spatial, temporal, and SNR scalability, each of which shows different visual effects. The aim of this paper is to define and develop a novel video quality metric allowing full scalability. It focuses on the effect of frame rate, SNR, the change of spatial resolution, and motion characteristics using subjective quality assessment. Experimental results show the proposed quality metric has a high correlation to subjective quality and that it is useful in determining the video quality of SVC.