Performance of peak signal-to-noise ratio quality assessment in video streaming with packet losses

The effect of packet losses over error-prone networks on visual quality of distributed video contents, estimated through subjective opinion and PSNR as an objective measure is analysed. It is shown that, within a fixed content, the variation of PSNR is a reliable indicator of the variation of packet loss rates. However, across different contents, the performance of PSNR is highly reduced. This performance drop can be corrected using the right pooling strategy.