Mixing Tile Resolutions in Tiled Video: A Perceptual Quality Assessment

The mismatch between increasingly large video resolution and constrained screen size of mobile devices has led to the proposal of zoomable video systems based on tiled video. In the current system, a tiled video frame is constructed from multiple tiles in a single resolution stream. In this paper, we explore the perceptual effect of mixed-resolution tiles in tiled video, in which tiles within a video frame could come from streams with different resolutions, with the aim to tradeoff bandwidth and perceptual video quality. To understand how users perceive the video quality of mixed-resolution tiled video, we conducted a psychophysical study with 50 participants on tiled videos where the tile resolutions are randomly chosen from two resolution levels with equal probability. The experiment results show that in many cases, we can mix tiles from HD (1920×1080p) stream and tiles from 1600×900p stream without being noticed by the viewers. Even when participants notice quality degradation in videos combined with tiles from HD stream and tiles from 960×540p stream, the majority of participants still accept the degradation when viewing videos with low and medium motion; and greater than 40% of participants accept the quality degradation when viewing video with dense motion.

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