A logo based approach for visual quality evaluation in telemedicine applications

We present a new approach for image and video quality evaluation in telemedicine applications. Our approach relies on analyzing the quality of a pre-known reduced size logo embedded in an unused part of the medical ultrasound frame. The method is tested using two different objective metrics, namely: the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and the Structural SIMilarity index metric (SSIM). We show that the presented method, not needing the original frame to predict the quality, achieves a high correlation coefficient (more than 0.9) for the different quality metrics used. We also present relationships between the quality derived via the logo and via the original frame and we assess the overhead in data transmission resulting from the compressed logo data and its protection overhead.

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