Reference-free objective quality metrics for MPEG-coded video

Abstract

With the growth of digital video delivery, there is an increasing demand for better and more efficient ways to measure video quality. Most existing video quality metrics are reference-based approaches that are not suitable to measure the video quality perceived by the end user without access to reference videos. In this paper, we propose a reference-free video quality metric for MPEG coded videos. It predicts subjective quality ratings using both reference-free MPEG artifact measures and MPEG system parameters (known or estimated). The advantage of this approach is that it does not need a precise separation of content and artifact or the removal of any artifacts. By exploring the correlations among different artifacts and system parameters, our approach can remove content dependency and achieve an accurate estimate of the subjective ratings.