Video livestreaming is gaining prevalence among video streaming services, especially for the delivery of live, high motion content such as sporting events. The quality of these livestreaming videos can be adversely affected by any of a wide variety of events, including capture artifacts, and distortions incurred during coding and transmission. High motion content can cause or exacerbate many kinds of distortion, such as motion blur and stutter. Because of this, the development of objective Video Quality Assessment (VQA) algorithms that can predict the perceptual quality of high motion, live streamed videos is greatly desired. Important resources for developing these algorithms are appropriate databases that exemplify the kinds of live streaming video distortions encountered in practice. Towards making progress in this direction, we built a video quality database specifically designed for live streaming VQA research. The new video database is called the Laboratory for Image and Video Engineering (LIVE) Livestream Database. The LIVE Livestream Database includes 315 videos of 45 source sequences from 33 original contents impaired by 6 types of distortions. We also performed a subjective quality study using the new database, whereby more than 12,000 human opinions were gathered from 40 subjects. We demonstrate the usefulness of the new resource by performing a holistic evaluation of the performance of current state-of-the-art (SOTA) VQA models. We envision that researchers will find the dataset to be useful for the development, testing, and comparison of future VQA models. The LIVE Livestream database is being made publicly available for these purposes at https://live.ece. utexas.edu/research/LIVE_APV_Study/apv_index.html

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This paper presents a double wavelet denoising (DWAD) method, which can preserve more details of an original signal. Although the noise removal method based on wavelet transform has been widely used, it still performs poorly for the signals with a low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) or frequency overlap. Different from the wavelet denoising methods based on a single basis function, the DWAD considers filtering the wavelet coefficients of the noisy signal by threshold functions under two different wavelet domains, simultaneously. It considers using the difference of wavelet coefficient distribution and forcing the denoised signals under two wavelet domains to be the same to achieve more retention of details. In addition, the arctangent function is employed as a penalty function for wavelet coefficients to induce strong sparse wavelet coefficients. The DWAD is applied to one-dimensional signals and it is found that some wavelet coefficients which are smaller than the threshold could be retained during noise removal. The experiment results show that the average SNR of different noise levels is improved by at least 4.2 and 2.1 dB compared with the classical soft threshold method for the one-dimensional and image signals, respectively. Besides, the DWAD tends to obtain better performance on the details of original signals.

Abstract-In the scalable video coder MC-EZBC, the motionvector (MV) bitstream was not scalable in bitrate or resolution. In this short paper, we enhance MC-EZBC with a new scalable MV coder based on context adaptive binary arithmetic coding. Alphabet general partition of MV symbols is proposed to achieve accuracy or quality scalability of MVs. A selective layered structure is used to reduce the number of MVs transmitted when appropriate, mainly needed for resolution scalability. With these two additions, we have a layered temporal, SNR, and resolution scalability for the MV bitstream. Experimentally, we find that this gives significant visual and objective improvement for low bitrates and/or resolutions with only very slight PSNR loss and unnoticeable visual loss at high bitrates.