Subjective evaluation of the effects of packet loss on HEVC encoded video streams
James Nightingale, Qi Wang, Christos Grecos, Sergio R. Goma · 2013
The emerging High Efficiency Video Coding standard (HEVC) will bring the benefit of delivering the same statistical quality at about half of the bandwidths required in the current H.264/AVC standard. Such significantly higher compression efficiency of HEVC will, however, potentially lead to higher sensitivity to packet loss and thus have a great impact on the users of portable consumer devices such as smartphones and tablets when delivering HEVC encoded video over loss-prone networks, thereby adversely affecting the user's quality of experience (QoE). Existing subjective evaluations of the perceptual quality of HEVC have focused on its performance in loss-free environments. In this work, we empirically transmit HEVC streams over a hybrid wired/wireless network at typical (UK) mobile broadband speeds under a range of packet loss conditions, using typical smartphone and tablet resolutions. Our subjective evaluation experiments quantify the effect, on perceptual quality, of packet loss in HEVC streams and establish a packet loss rate threshold of 3% beyond which users find poor perceptual quality has a detrimental effect on their QoE. Furthermore, we employ two error concealment schemes to mitigate the impact of packet loss/corruption and investigate their effectiveness on users' QoE.