Video quality assessment and machine learning: Performance and interpretability

In this work we compare a simple and a complex Machine Learning (ML) method used for the purpose of Video Quality Assessment (VQA). The simple ML method chosen is the Elastic Net (EN), which is a regularized linear regression model and easier to interpret. The more complex method chosen is Support Vector Regression (SVR), which has gained popularity in VQA research. Additionally, we present an ML-based feature selection method. Also, it is investigated how well the methods perform when tested on videos from other datasets. Our results show that content-independent cross-validation performance on a single dataset can be misleading and that in the case of very limited training and test data, especially in regards to different content as is the case for many video datasets, a simple ML approach is the better choice.