A Novel Blind Measurement of Blocking Artifacts for H.264/AVC Video

This paper presents a novel method for fast and quantified estimation of blocking artifacts for H.264 videos. Based on physiological characteristics of the human visual system (HVS), the proposed method takes into account the temporal blocky distortion between two successive frames and is well adapted to the videos in which the in-loop deblocking filter is applied. Furthermore, the proposed method is computationally efficient and does not require the original video sequence for reference. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the computational efficiency of the proposed method. Comparison results also show that the blocking artifacts evaluated by the proposed method agree well with the other objective assessment method such as PSNR, VQM and SSIM. Due to its accuracy and efficiency, the proposed method can be used as a quality metric alone or a factor in quality evaluation in real-time multimedia communication applications.