Combining Video Quality Metrics To Select Perceptually Accurate Resolution In A Wide Quality Range: A Case Study

It is beneficial to have adaptive resolution selection during encoding for the viewer’s optimal experience in a video delivery scenario. For instance, per-title content-adaptive techniques have been exploited for OTT/VOD delivery. An established solution is to build the selection of better resolution on typical video quality metrics. In this context, this paper first introduces measuring the performance of video quality metrics to accurately predict which encoding resolution is subjectively better suited to a particular scene of interest in a video. Then, with a Random Forest (RF) classifier, a novel, subjectively accurate classifier called RF-based fusion metric is proposed to decide which encoding resolution is best suited to compensate for individual metrics’ disparate performance over different quality ranges. The proposed RF classifier encompasses classical video quality metric scores as features and is trained to be closer to subjective experimental results. Performance comparison of this proposed RF-based fusion metric is discussed in comparison to other metrics and subjective experiments.