# HDR or SDR? A Subjective and Objective Study of Scaled and Compressed Videos

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.13162 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.13162/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 11 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Apr 2023.

## Builds on (most cited first, 11 of 11)

- [Patch-VQ: 'Patching Up' the Video Quality Problem](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.13544/) (2020)
- [UGC-VQA: Benchmarking Blind Video Quality Assessment for User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14354/) (2020)
- [YouTube UGC Dataset for Video Compression Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.06457/) (2019)
- [RAPIQUE: Rapid and Accurate Video Quality Prediction of User Generated Content](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.10955/) (2021)
- [ST-GREED: Space-Time Generalized Entropic Differences for Frame Rate Dependent Video Quality Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.13715/) (2020)
- [Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of High Frame Rate Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.11634/) (2020)
- [ChipQA: No-Reference Video Quality Prediction via Space-Time Chips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08726/) (2021)
- [A Subjective and Objective Study of Space-Time Subsampled Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.00088/) (2021)
- [Subjective Assessment of High Dynamic Range Videos Under Different Ambient Conditions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.10005/) (2022)
- [No-Reference Video Quality Assessment Using Space-Time Chips](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.00031/) (2020)
- [Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of High-Motion Sports Videos at Low-Bitrates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05798/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Video Quality Assessment: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.04508/) (2024)
- [CompressedVQA-HDR: Generalized Full-reference and No-reference Quality Assessment Models for Compressed High Dynamic Range Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11900/) (2025)
- [HDRSDR-VQA: A Subjective Video Quality Dataset for HDR and SDR Comparative Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.21831/) (2025)
- [Encoder-Quantization-Motion-based Video Quality Metrics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06620/) (2024)
- [Subjective and Objective Analysis of Indian Social Media Video Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.02794/) (2024)
- [A review on Machine Learning based User-Centric Multimedia Streaming Techniques](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15801/) (2024)
- [Seeing Beyond 8bits: Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of HDR-UGC Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.00938/) (2026)
- [Learning Flexible Generalization in Video Quality Assessment by Bringing Device and Viewing Condition Distributions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.04643/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We conducted a large-scale study of human perceptual quality judgments of High Dynamic Range (HDR) and Standard Dynamic Range (SDR) videos subjected to scaling and compression levels and viewed on three different display devices. HDR videos are able to present wider color gamuts, better contrasts, and brighter whites and darker blacks than SDR videos. While conventional expectations are that HDR quality is better than SDR quality, we have found subject preference of HDR versus SDR depends heavily on the display device, as well as on resolution scaling and bitrate. To study this question, we collected more than 23,000 quality ratings from 67 volunteers who watched 356 videos on OLED, QLED, and LCD televisions. Since it is of interest to be able to measure the quality of videos under these scenarios, e.g. to inform decisions regarding scaling, compression, and SDR vs HDR, we tested several well-known full-reference and no-reference video quality models on the new database. Towards advancing progress on this problem, we also developed a novel no-reference model called HDRPatchMAX, that uses both classical and bit-depth sensitive distortion statistics more accurately than existing metrics.