Derivation Procedure of Coefficients of Metadata-based Model for Adaptive Bitrate Streaming Services

Abstract

Since the quality of video streaming services is degraded due to the encoding, network congestion, and lack of a playout buffer, the normality of services needs to be monitored by gathering the quality measured at the end clients. When measuring quality at the end clients, the computational power should be sufficiently low, the bitstream information cannot be accessed for the quality estimation due to the encryption, and reference video cannot be used at the end clients. Therefore, metadata-based models have been developed and standardized that take metadata such as the resolution, framerate, and bitrate, and stalling information as input and calculate the quality. However, calculated quality for linear TV and video on demand (VoD) services cannot be compared because metadata-based models cannot calculate the impacts of codec strategies (e.g., H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and AV1) and configurations (e.g., 1-pass encoding for linear TV or 2-pass encoding for VoD) on the quality. To take into account the impact of codec strategies and configurations, coefficients of metadatabased model need to be optimized per codec strategy and configuration using subjective quality. However, extensive subjective assessment tests are difficult to frequently conduct because they are expensive and time consuming and need to be conducted by video quality experts. Therefore, to monitor the quality of several types of video streaming services (e.g., linear TV and VoD) and to compare these qualities, a derivation procedure is proposed for obtaining coefficients of metadata-based models using a fullreference model. To validate the procedure, extensive subjective assessment tests were conducted. Finally, it is shown that three metadata-based models (i.e., the P.1203.1 mode 0 model, extended P.1203.1 mode 0 model, and model proposed by Yamagishi et al.) based on the proposed procedure using the video multimethod assessment fusion (VMAF) algorithm estimate quality accurately in terms of root mean squared error. key words: adaptive bitrate streaming, codec configuration, full-reference model, metadata-based model