Subjective quality assessment comparing UHD and HD resolution in HEVC transmission chains

Ultra High Definition Television (UHDTV) is an emerging broadcasting system, aiming to replace the current High Definition Television (HDTV) in the near future. One aspect of UHDTV is to allow for higher resolutions, notably UHD1, which requires a four times increased datarate for uncompressed transmission compared to Full-HD resolution. As bandwidth for transmission channels in television broadcast is often a fixed value, this study provides information about the perceived quality for transmitting UHD1 content compared to Full-HD content at the same bitrate encoded with HEVC. Content influence is tested with 15 video contents and 4 bitrates are individually chosen per content to span the range of the perceptual scale. The methodology of Absolute Category Rating with Hidden Reference (ACR-HR) is used to collect votes from 24 viewers. The statistical analysis of the collected data shows that, in most cases, there is no significant quality difference between videos transmitted in Full-HD and UHD1 resolution but that the results strongly depend on the content type and on the capture quality. It is also shown that the required bitrate for achieving a chosen broadcast quality level varies with content by a factor of about 14 in HEVC coding.