Deep-BVQM: A Deep-learning Bitstream-based Video Quality Model

With the rapid increase of video streaming content, high-quality video quality metrics, mainly signal-based video quality metrics, are emerging, notably VMAF, SSIMPLUS, and AVQM. Besides signal-based video quality metrics, within the standardization body, ITU-T Study Group 12, two well-known bitstream-based video quality metrics are developed named P.1203 and P.1204.3. Due to the low complexity and low level of access to the bitstream data, these models gained attention from network providers and service providers. In this paper, we proposed a new bitstream-based model named Deep-BVQM, which outperforms the standard models on the tested datasets. While the model comes with slightly higher computational complexity, it offers a frame-level quality prediction which is essential diagnostic information for some video streaming services such as cloud gaming. Deep-BVQM is developed in two layers; first, the frame quality was predicted using a lightweight CNN model. Next, the latent features of the CNN were used to train an LSTM network to predict the video quality in a short-term duration.