Quality monitoring of video over the Internet

We consider monitoring the quality of compressed video transmitted over a packet network from the perspective of a network service provider. Our focus is on no-reference methods, which assume that the original signal is not available for computing the quality estimate. We present three methods to estimate mean squared error (MSE) from the video bitstream. The first method uses only network-level measurements (like packet loss rate), the second extracts the spatio-temporal extent of the impact of the loss, and the third extracts sequence-specific information including spatio-temporal activity and the effects of error propagation. Simulation results show that the first method has the lowest complexity but the worst performance, while the third method performs best with manageable complexity.