Evaluation of video quality metrics on transmission distortions in H.264 coded video

The development of high-speed access networks has enabled a variety of video delivery alternatives over the Internet, for example IPTV and peer-to-peer based video services as Voddler. Consequently, the development of real-time video QoE monitoring methods is receiving large attention in the research community. We believe that the good performing objective metrics using reference information could be used to speed up the development process of real-time video QoE monitoring methods. Thus in this paper we study the accuracy of full-reference objective methods for assessing the quality degradation due to the transmission distortions. We evaluated several well-known publicly-available full-reference objective metrics on the freely available EPFL-PoliMI (Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne and Politecnico di Milano) video quality assessment database, which was specifically designed for the evaluation of transmission distortions. The full-reference metrics are usually evaluated using a reference which is uncompressed. Instead, we study the performance of the metrics when the reference videos are lightly compressed to ensure high quality.