Evaluating Video Quality Metrics for Neural and Traditional Codecs using 4K/UHD-1 Videos

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Herb, Benjamin, Rao, Rakesh Rao Ramachandra, Göring, Steve, Raake, Alexander
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Herb, Benjamin
Rao, Rakesh Rao Ramachandra
Göring, Steve
Raake, Alexander
author_facet Herb, Benjamin
Rao, Rakesh Rao Ramachandra
Göring, Steve
Raake, Alexander
contents With neural video codecs (NVCs) emerging as promising alternatives for traditional compression methods, it is increasingly important to determine whether existing quality metrics remain valid for evaluating their performance. However, few studies have systematically investigated this using well-designed subjective tests. To address this gap, this paper presents a subjective quality assessment study using two traditional (AV1 and VVC) and two variants of a neural video codec (DCVC-FM and DCVC-RT). Six source videos (8-10 seconds each, 4K/UHD-1, 60 fps) were encoded at four resolutions (360p to 2160p) using nine different QP values, resulting in 216 sequences that were rated in a controlled environment by 30 participants. These results were used to evaluate a range of full-reference, hybrid, and no-reference quality metrics to assess their applicability to the induced quality degradations. The objective quality assessment results show that VMAF and AVQBits|H0|f demonstrate strong Pearson correlation, while FasterVQA performed best among the tested no-reference metrics. Furthermore, PSNR shows the highest Spearman rank order correlation for within-sequence comparisons across the different codecs. Importantly, no significant performance differences in metric reliability are observed between traditional and neural video codecs across the tested metrics. The dataset, consisting of source videos, encoded videos, and both subjective and quality metric scores will be made publicly available following an open-science approach (https://github.com/Telecommunication-Telemedia-Assessment/AVT-VQDB-UHD-1-NVC).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_00969
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Video Quality Metrics for Neural and Traditional Codecs using 4K/UHD-1 Videos
Herb, Benjamin
Rao, Rakesh Rao Ramachandra
Göring, Steve
Raake, Alexander
Image and Video Processing
With neural video codecs (NVCs) emerging as promising alternatives for traditional compression methods, it is increasingly important to determine whether existing quality metrics remain valid for evaluating their performance. However, few studies have systematically investigated this using well-designed subjective tests. To address this gap, this paper presents a subjective quality assessment study using two traditional (AV1 and VVC) and two variants of a neural video codec (DCVC-FM and DCVC-RT). Six source videos (8-10 seconds each, 4K/UHD-1, 60 fps) were encoded at four resolutions (360p to 2160p) using nine different QP values, resulting in 216 sequences that were rated in a controlled environment by 30 participants. These results were used to evaluate a range of full-reference, hybrid, and no-reference quality metrics to assess their applicability to the induced quality degradations. The objective quality assessment results show that VMAF and AVQBits|H0|f demonstrate strong Pearson correlation, while FasterVQA performed best among the tested no-reference metrics. Furthermore, PSNR shows the highest Spearman rank order correlation for within-sequence comparisons across the different codecs. Importantly, no significant performance differences in metric reliability are observed between traditional and neural video codecs across the tested metrics. The dataset, consisting of source videos, encoded videos, and both subjective and quality metric scores will be made publicly available following an open-science approach (https://github.com/Telecommunication-Telemedia-Assessment/AVT-VQDB-UHD-1-NVC).
title Evaluating Video Quality Metrics for Neural and Traditional Codecs using 4K/UHD-1 Videos
topic Image and Video Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00969