2BiVQA: Double Bi-LSTM based Video Quality Assessment of UGC Videos

Recently, with the growing popularity of mobile devices as well as video sharing platforms (e.g., YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, and Twitch), User-Generated Content (UGC) videos have become increasingly common and now account for a large portion of multimedia traffic on the internet. Unlike professionally generated videos produced by filmmakers and videographers, typically, UGC videos contain multiple authentic distortions, generally introduced during capture and processing by naive users. Quality prediction of UGC videos is of paramount importance to optimize and monitor their processing in hosting platforms, such as their coding, transcoding, and streaming. However, blind quality prediction of UGC is quite challenging because the degradations of UGC videos are unknown and very diverse, in addition to the unavailability of pristine reference. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an accurate and efficient Blind Video Quality Assessment (BVQA) model for UGC videos, which we name 2BiVQA for double Bi-LSTM Video Quality Assessment. 2BiVQA metric consists of three main blocks, including a pre-trained Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract discriminative features from image patches, which are then fed into two Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) for spatial and temporal pooling. Specifically, we use two Bi-directional Long Short Term Memory (Bi-LSTM) networks, the first is used to capture short-range dependencies between image patches, while the second allows capturing long-range dependencies between frames to account for the temporal memory effect. Experimental results on recent large-scale UGC video quality datasets show that 2BiVQA achieves high performance at a lower computational cost than state-of-the-art models. The source code of our 2BiVQA metric is made publicly available at: https://github.com/atelili/2BiVQA.