Matched Quality Evaluation of Temporally Downsampled Videos with Non-Integer Factors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel quality evaluation method for temporally downsampled videos with non-integer frame rate ratios, enabling more flexible assessment of video quality beyond traditional integer-based downsampling.

Contribution

It proposes a new approach to evaluate video quality for non-integer frame rate ratios, extending the applicability of existing metrics to more realistic downsampling scenarios.

Findings

Allows quality comparison between sequences with fractional frame rate ratios

Applicable to any full-reference quality metric

Enhances evaluation flexibility for temporal downsampling

Abstract

Recent research has shown that temporal downsampling of high-frame-rate sequences can be exploited to improve the rate-distortion performance in video coding. However, until now, research only targeted downsampling factors of powers of two, which greatly restricts the potential applicability of temporal downsampling. A major reason is that traditional, objective quality metrics such as peak signal-to-noise ratio or more recent approaches, which try to mimic subjective quality, can only be evaluated between two sequences whose frame rate ratio is an integer value. To relieve this problem, we propose a quality evaluation method that allows calculating the distortion between two sequences whose frame rate ratio is fractional. The proposed method can be applied to any full-reference quality metric.