Deep learning for quality assessment in live video streaming

Video content providers put stringent requirements on the quality assessment methods realized on their services. They need to be accurate, real-time, adaptable to new content, and scalable as the video set grows. In this letter, we introduce a novel automated and computationally efficient video assessment method. It enables accurate real-time (online) analysis of delivered quality in an adaptable and scalable manner. Offline deep unsupervised learning processes are employed at the server side and inexpensive no-reference measurements at the client side. This provides both real-time assessment, as well as performance comparable to the full reference counter-part, while maintaining its no-reference characteristics. We tested our approach on the LIMP Video Quality Database (an extensive packet loss impaired video-set) obtaining a correlation between 78% and 91% to the FR benchmark (the Video Quality Metric, VQM). Due to its unsupervised learning essence, our method is flexible, dynamically adaptable to new content and scalable with the number of videos.