A hybrid no-reference blockiness metric for H.264 standard

In this paper, a hybrid no-reference blockiness metric along with its calculation method is presented as a quantitative distortion measure of blocking artifacts for H.264 advanced video compression standard. Firstly, blocking artifacts are obtained by using Sobel operator for each block within a frame. Spatial masking and temporal masking effects are incorporated into the proposed metric as well. Moreover, quantization parameters from the compression domains are extracted and taken into account in the metric to interpret the fact that the blocking artifacts are usually introduced during compressing process. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can measure the blocking artifacts accurately and is sensitive to bit rate as well.