Coding distortion assessment for streaming video

For applications involving video streaming, full decoding is usually not acceptable for quality assessment. To address the inherent challenges, an efficient method for coding distortion assessment is proposed in this paper. Building on empirical analysis, the proposed method employs a linear model to assess the coding distortion using the quantization scale. Furthermore, the characteristics of the human visual system are exploited by taking into account the spatial and temporal masking. To estimate the required spatial and temporal complexities in absence of sufficient information, a rate-distortion model is theoretically derived to formulate their relationship with the coding bit-rate. Extensive experimental results have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed method for quality assessment with respect to perceived coding distortion.