NR-GVQM: A No Reference Gaming Video Quality Metric

Gaming as a popular system has recently expanded the associated services, by stepping into live streaming services. Live gaming video streaming is not only limited to cloud gaming services, such as Geforce Now, but also include passive streaming, where the players' gameplay is streamed both live and ondemand over services such as Twitch.tv and YouTubeGaming. So far, in terms of gaming video quality assessment, typical video quality assessment methods have been used. However, their performance remains quite unsatisfactory. In this paper, we present a new No Reference (NR) gaming video quality metric called NR-GVQM with performance comparable to state-of-the-art Full Reference (FR) metrics. NR-GVQM is designed by training a Support Vector Regression (SVR) with the Gaussian kernel using nine frame-level indexes such as naturalness and blockiness as input features and Video Multimethod Assessment Fusion (VMAF) scores as the ground truth. Our results based on a publicly available dataset of gaming videos are shown to have a correlation score of 0.98 with VMAF and 0.89 with MOS scores. We further present two approaches to reduce computational complexity.