Subjective Evaluation of Frame Rate in Bitrate-Constrained Live Streaming

TL;DR

This paper investigates how frame rate impacts perceived video quality in bitrate-constrained live streaming, introducing a new dataset and subjective evaluation to better understand this perceptual trade-off.

Contribution

The authors created the HFR-LS dataset with 384 videos, systematically varying bitrate and frame rate, and conducted a subjective study to analyze their effects on perceived quality.

Findings

Frame rate significantly affects perceived quality.

Perception of quality interacts with bitrate and content.

The dataset enables further research in this area.

Abstract

Bandwidth constraints in live streaming require video codecs to balance compression strength and frame rate, yet the perceptual consequences of this trade-off remain underexplored. We present the high frame rate live streaming (HFR-LS) dataset, comprising 384 subject-rated 1080p videos encoded at multiple target bitrates by systematically varying compression strength and frame rate. A single-stimulus, hidden-reference subjective study shows that frame rate has a noticeable effect on perceived quality, and interacts with both bitrate and source content. The HFR-LS dataset is available at https://github.com/real-hjq/HFR-LS to facilitate research on bitrate-constrained live streaming.