An objective technique for assessing video impairments

An objective video impairment assessment technique that appears to quantify the perceptual impact of video impairments in an accurate way is presented. The development uses 132 impaired video sequences that cover a remarkably wide range of motion, detail, impairment type, and impairment level. The approach discussed in based on digital image processing operations performed on digitized original and impaired video sequences. Measurements that quantify perceptual video attributes in both the spatial and the temporal domains are extracted from the digitized video. These measurements are then used to compute a single score that quantifies the perceptual impact of the impairments present in the video sequence. This objective impairment score is well-correlated (r=.92) with impairment assessments made by human viewers. Thus, it can be used to augment, or possibly to replace, the expensive and time-consuming subjective viewing tests that are typically used to evaluate video coding and transmission techniques