Subjective and Objective Analysis of Streamed Gaming Videos

The rising popularity of online user-generated-content (UGC) in the form of streamed and shared videos has hastened the development of perceptual video quality assessment (VQA) models, which can be used to help optimize their delivery. Gaming videos, which are a relatively new type of UGC videos, are created when skilled and casual gamers post videos of their gameplay. These kinds of screenshots of UGC gameplay videos have become extremely popular on major streaming platforms, such as YouTube and Twitch. Synthetically generated gaming content presents challenges to existing VQA algorithms, including those based on natural scene/video statistics models. Synthetically generated gaming content presents different statistical behavior than naturalistic videos. A number of studies have been directed toward understanding the perceptual characteristics of professionally generated gaming videos arising in gaming video streaming, online gaming, and cloud gaming. However, little work has been done on understanding the quality of UGC gaming videos, and how it can be characterized and predicted. Toward boosting the progress of gaming video VQA model development, we conducted a comprehensive study of subjective and objective VQA models on UGC gaming videos. To do this, we created a novel UGC gaming video resource, called the LIVE-YouTube Gaming video quality (LIVE-YT-Gaming) database, comprised of 600 real UGC gaming videos. We conducted a subjective human study on this data, yielding 18 600 human quality ratings recorded by 61 human subjects. We also evaluated a number of state-of-the-art VQA models on the new database, including a new one, called GAME-VQP, based on both natural video statistics and CNN-learned features. To help support work in this field, we are making the new LIVE-YT-Gaming Database, along with code for GAME-VQP, publicly available through the link: https://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVE-YT-Gaming/index.html .