Effects of Different Full-Reference Quality Assessment Metrics in End-to-End Deep Video Coding

Visual quality assessment is often used as a key performance indicator (KPI) to evaluate the performance of electronic devices. There exists a significant association between visual quality assessment and electronic devices. In this paper, we bring attention to alternative choices of perceptual loss function for end-to-end deep video coding (E2E-DVC), which can be used to reduce the amount of data generated by electronic sensors and other sources. Thus, we analyze the effects of different full-reference quality assessment (FR-QA) metrics on E2E-DVC. First, we select five optimization-suitable FR-QA metrics as perceptual objectives, which are differentiable and thus support back propagation, and use them to optimize an E2E-DVC model. Second, we analyze the rate–distortion (R-D) behaviors of an E2E-DVC model under different loss function optimizations. Third, we carry out subjective human perceptual tests on the reconstructed videos to show the performance of different FR-QA optimizations on subjective visual quality. This study reveals the effects of the competing FR-QA metrics on E2E-DVC and provides a guide for further future study on E2E-DVC in terms of perceptual loss function design.