No reference metric of video coding quality based on parametric analysis of video bitstream

In this paper, we propose a novel method to measure the perceived picture quality of H.264 coded video based on parametric analysis of the coded bitstream. The parametric analysis means that the proposed method utilizes only bitstream parameters, while it does not have any access to the baseband signal (pixel level information) of the decoded video. The proposed method extracts quantiser-scale, slice type and transformed coefficients from each macroblock. These parameters are used to calculate spatiotemporal image features to reflect coding artifacts which have a strong relation to the subjective quality. A computer simulation shows that the proposed method can estimate the subjective quality at a correlation coefficient of 0.867 whereas the PSNR metric, which is referred to as a benchmark, correlates the subjective quality at a correlation coefficient of 0.773.