Assessing the perceptual influence of H.264/SVC Signal-to-Noise Ratio and temporal scalability on full length movies

The scalable video coding extension of the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard allows encoding a video sequence once and streaming it over heterogeneous networks to a variety of end devices. Different scalability techniques can be employed in order to deliver the most appropriate video bitstream based on network and device characteristics. However, users´ Quality of Experience should be maximized at all time. In this paper, we investigate the influence of using temporal scalability and signal-to-noise ratio (quality) scalability on the Quality of Experience. A subjective test was conducted following a new methodology based on quality assessment using full length movies. This enables users to evaluate the video content in more realistic environments. During the test, subjects were asked to rate a movie which contained several scalability degradations. Results indicate that users, in general, favour temporal scalability over quality scalability.