Subjective Quality Assessment of H.264/AVC Video Streaming with Packet Losses

Research in the field of video quality assessment relies on the availability of subjective scores, collected by means of experiments in which groups of people are asked to rate the quality of video sequences. The availability of subjective scores is fundamental to enable validation and comparative benchmarking of the objective algorithms that try to predict human perception of video quality by automatically analyzing the video sequences, in a way to support reproducible and reliable research results. In this paper, a publicly available database of subjective quality scores and corrupted video sequences is described. The scores refer to 156 sequences at CIF and 4CIF spatial resolutions, encoded with H.264/AVC and corrupted by simulating the transmission over an error-prone network. The subjective evaluation has been performed by 40 subjects at the premises of two academic institutions, in standard-compliant controlled environments. In order to support reproducible research in the field of full-reference, reduced-reference, and no-reference video quality assessment algorithms, both the uncompressed files and the H.264/AVC bitstreams, as well as the packet loss patterns, have been made available to the research community.