Influence of spatial and temporal activity of upscaled video on its perceived quality

High network resources costs led to the increasingly usage of scalable video coding in video transmission over the network. Prior to displaying on user device, the transmitted video should be spatial and/or temporal upscaled in order to ensure the acceptable perceived quality level. In this work the relationship between the spatio-temporal activity of upscaled sequence and its perceived quality is examined. The experiments are performed for videos presented on PC and on smartphone, while three different activity measures are analyzed. It is shown that the newly-introduced spatio-temporal activity measure, called SITImean, achieves a high level of correlation with subjective quality scores. Therefore it could be used as an indicator of upscaled video quality, replacing the expensive subjective quality evaluation tests.