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Recommendations for Verifying HDR Subjective Testing Workflows: Abstract and Introduction

by Quality Assurance Career Development ResourcesJuly 7th, 2024

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In this paper, researchers present a set of recommendations for conformance testing of High Dynamic Range displays and content.

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Author:

(1) Vibhoothi,Sigmedia Group, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (Email: [email protected]);

(2) Angeliki Katsenou, Sigmedia Group, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland & Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, University of Bristol, United Kingdom (Email: [email protected]);

(3) John Squires, Sigmedia Group, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (Email: [email protected]);

(4) Franc¸ois Pitie, Sigmedia Group, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (Email: [email protected]);

(5) Anil Kokaram, Sigmedia Group, Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland (Email: [email protected]).

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Abstract—Over the past few years, there has been an increase in the demand and availability of High Dynamic Range (HDR) displays and content. To ensure the production of high-quality materials, human evaluation is required. However, ascertaining whether the full playback pipeline is indeed HDR-compliant can be challenging. In this paper, we present a set of recommendations for conformance testing to validate various aspects of the testing workflow, including playback, displays, brightness, colours, and viewing environment. We assessed the effectiveness of HDR conversion techniques used in current standards development (3GPP) for making source materials. Additionally, we evaluate HDR display technologies, including OLED and LCD, using both consumer television and a reference monitor

Index Terms—HDR, testing workflow, testing environment, playback, video coding.

I. INTRODUCTION

In recent years, HDR displays sales and content delivery have increased [1], [2]. Oftentimes, the displayed video output may not always be true HDR. It is hard to confirm whether the playback is actually HDR or to cross-check a playback pipeline disruption. Validating this is important for quality assessment studies and it yields technical challenges.

The development of standards testing protocols for subjective viewing environments for HDR videos is being led by the Video Quality Experts Group (VQEG), International Telecommunication Union (ITU) Recommendations, and the European Broadcasters Union (EBU) for both televisions and broadcast applications [3]–[6]. Despite efforts made by previous authors to explore and adapt these techniques for HDR subjective studies [7]–[10], there are still issues unresolved. Particularly, the configuration and technical validation of the playback pipeline is often not transparently presented in the literature. Thus, there is currently a lack of an HDR quality assessment framework that can be readily used to conform with these standards.

Taking into account all the above, in this paper, we introduce an HDR quality assessment testing workflow (Section III), which comprises three important elements, a) the documentation of the playback pipeline, b) the HDR intermediate file conversions, and c) the testing environment.

This work was funded by DTIF EI Grant No DT-2019-0068 and The ADAPT SFI Research Center.