Subjective quality assessment comparing UHD and HD resolution in HEVC transmission chains
Résumé
Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV) is an emerging
broadcasting system, aiming to replace the current High Def-
inition Television (HDTV) in the near future. One aspect of
UHDTV is to allow for higher resolutions, notably UHD1,
which requires a four times increased datarate for uncom-
pressed transmission compared to Full-HD resolution. As
bandwidth for transmission channels in television broadcast is
often a fixed value, this study provides information about the
perceived quality for transmitting UHD1 content compared
to Full-HD content at the same bitrate encoded with HEVC.
Content influence is tested with 15 video contents and 4 bi-
trates are individually chosen per content to span the range of
the perceptual scale. The methodology of Absolute Category
Rating with Hidden Reference (ACR-HR) is used to collect
votes from 24 viewers. The statistical analysis of the collected
data shows that, in most cases, there is no significant quality
difference between videos transmitted in Full-HD and UHD1
resolution but that the results strongly depend on the content
type and on the capture quality. It is also shown that the re-
quired bitrate for achieving a chosen broadcast quality level
varies with content by a factor of about 14 in HEVC coding.