The effect of viewing distance and display peak luminance - HDR AV1 video streaming quality dataset

Abstract

While it is well recognized that the visibility of distortions is affected by the viewing distance and display peak luminance, very few datasets control those conditions, and also few video quality metrics can account for them. To address this gap, we collected a new video quality dataset, HDR-VDC, which captures the quality degradation of HDR content due to AV1 coding artifacts and the resolution reduction. The quality drop was measured at two viewing distances, corresponding to 60 and 120 pixels per visual degree, and two display mean luminance levels, 51 and 5.6 nits. In contrast to the existing datasets that use direct rating protocol, we employ a highly sensitive pairwise comparison protocol with active sampling and comparisons across viewing distances to ensure possibly accurate quality measurements. We also provide the first publicly available dataset that measures the effect of display peak luminance and includes HDR videos encoded with AV1. Our results indicate that the effect of both viewing distance and display luminance is significant, and it reduces the visibility of coding and upsampling artifacts on dimmer displays or those seen from a further distance. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.107964 and the code at https://github.com/gfxdisp/HDR-VDC.