LOW BIT RATE VIDEO QUALITY ASSESSMENT BASED ON PERCEPTUAL CHARACTERISTICS

Peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) is not a good measure of perceived picture quality, especially at low bit rates of coding. This paper proposes a new approach for computing perceptual distortion for visual signal in order to provide an objective measure for perceptual quality at low bit rate coding in typically mobile communications. The regions with three major perceptually disturbing artefacts, namely, damaged edge, blockiness and ringing, are detected as the basis of assessment. The correlation of the metric with human perception has been demonstrated with low bit rate CIF test data.

[1]  D. Spalding.  The Principles of Psychology , 1873, Nature.

[2]  R. Hess,et al.  Temporal detection in human vision: dependence on stimulus energy. , 1997, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision.

[3]  Stefan Winkler,et al.  Perceptual distortion metric for digital color video , 1999, Electronic Imaging.

[4]  D. H. Kelly.  Spatiotemporal variation of chromatic and achromatic contrast thresholds. , 1983, Journal of the Optical Society of America.

[5]  H.R. Wu,et al.  A generalized block-edge impairment metric for video coding , 1997, IEEE Signal Processing Letters.

[6]  James Hu,et al.  DVQ: A digital video quality metric based on human vision , 2001 .

[7]  Mohammed Ghanbari,et al.  A multi-metric objective picture-quality measurement model for MPEG video , 2000, IEEE Trans. Circuits Syst. Video Technol..

[8]  Nariman Farvardin,et al.  A perceptually motivated three-component image model-Part I: description of the model , 1995, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[9]  Zhenghua Yu,et al.  Vision-model-based impairment metric to evaluate blocking artifacts in digital video , 2002, Proc. IEEE.

[10]  A Bradley,et al.  Contrast dependence and mechanisms of masking interactions among chromatic and luminance gratings. , 1988, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics and image science.

[11]  Robert Hooke,et al.  `` Direct Search'' Solution of Numerical and Statistical Problems , 1961, JACM.

[12]  Edward H. Adelson,et al.  The Design and Use of Steerable Filters , 1991, IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell..

[13]  V. Ralph Algazi,et al.  Objective picture quality scale (PQS) for image coding , 1998, IEEE Trans. Commun..

[14]  Nick G. Kingsbury,et al.  A distortion measure for blocking artifacts in images based on human visual sensitivity , 1995, IEEE Trans. Image Process..

[15]  J A Solomon,et al.  Model of visual contrast gain control and pattern masking. , 1997, Journal of the Optical Society of America. A, Optics, image science, and vision.