A subjective and objective evaluation of a realistic 3D IPTV transmission chain

In 3D transmissions, often a large perceptual quality gain can be achieved by slightly increasing the bitrate. However, at a certain bitrate, a saturation effect is noted and further increasing the bitrate does not lead to significant improvements of Quality of Experience (QoE). This bitrate will be called quality saturation bitrate. The purpose of this paper is to investigate a subjective and objective method to determine the quality saturation bitrate. An evaluation is presented which uses a wide spread of content types and a realistic transmission chain that includes a hardware encoder and commercial Set-Top-Boxes. A subjective assessment for various bitrates is performed using the SAMVIQ methodology and the results are also compared to objective measurements with VQM and VQUAD.