A locally-adaptive algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos

Block transform coding is the most popular approach for image and video compression. The objective measurement of blocking artifacts plays an important role in the design, optimization, and assessment of image and video coding systems. This paper presents a new algorithm for measuring blocking artifacts in images and videos. It exhibits unique and useful features: 1) it examines the blocks individually so that it can measure the severity of blocking artifacts locally; 2) it is a one-pass algorithm in the sense that the image needs to be accessed only once; 3) it takes into account the blocking artifacts for high bit rate images and the flatness for the very low bit rate images; 4) the blocking artifacts measure is well-defined in the range of 0-10. Experiments on various still images and videos show that this blockiness measure is very efficient in terms of computational complexity and memory usage, and can produce consistent blocking artifacts measurement.