TY - JOUR
T1 - An experimental survey of no-reference video quality assessment methods
AU - Torres Vega, Maria
AU - Sguazzo, Vittorio
AU - Mocanu, Decebal Constantin
AU - Liotta, Antonio
PY - 2016
Y1 - 2016
N2 - Purpose–The Video Quality Metric (VQM) is one of the most used objective methods to assess video quality, because of its high correlation with the human visual system (HVS). VQM is, however, not viable in real-time deployments such as mobile streaming, not only due to its high computational demands but also because, as a Full Reference (FR) metric, it requires both the original video and its impaired counterpart. In contrast, No Reference (NR) objective algorithms operate directly on the impaired video and are considerably faster but loose out in accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to study how differently NR metrics perform in the presence of network impairments. Design/methodology/approach–The authors assess eight NR metrics, alongside a lightweight FR metric, using VQM as benchmark in a self-developed network-impaired video data set. This paper covers a range of methods, a diverse set of video types and encoding conditions and a variety of network impairment test-cases. Findings–The authors show the extent by which packet loss affects different video types, correlating the accuracy of NR metrics to the FR benchmark. This paper helps identifying the conditions under which simple metrics may be used effectively and indicates an avenue to control the quality of streaming systems. Originality/value–Most studies in literature have focused on assessing streams that are either unaffected by the network (e.g. looking at the effects of video compression algorithms) or are affected by synthetic network impairments (i.e. via simulated network conditions). The authors show that when streams are affected by real network conditions, assessing Quality of Experience becomes even harder, as the existing metrics perform poorly.
AB - Purpose–The Video Quality Metric (VQM) is one of the most used objective methods to assess video quality, because of its high correlation with the human visual system (HVS). VQM is, however, not viable in real-time deployments such as mobile streaming, not only due to its high computational demands but also because, as a Full Reference (FR) metric, it requires both the original video and its impaired counterpart. In contrast, No Reference (NR) objective algorithms operate directly on the impaired video and are considerably faster but loose out in accuracy. The purpose of this paper is to study how differently NR metrics perform in the presence of network impairments. Design/methodology/approach–The authors assess eight NR metrics, alongside a lightweight FR metric, using VQM as benchmark in a self-developed network-impaired video data set. This paper covers a range of methods, a diverse set of video types and encoding conditions and a variety of network impairment test-cases. Findings–The authors show the extent by which packet loss affects different video types, correlating the accuracy of NR metrics to the FR benchmark. This paper helps identifying the conditions under which simple metrics may be used effectively and indicates an avenue to control the quality of streaming systems. Originality/value–Most studies in literature have focused on assessing streams that are either unaffected by the network (e.g. looking at the effects of video compression algorithms) or are affected by synthetic network impairments (i.e. via simulated network conditions). The authors show that when streams are affected by real network conditions, assessing Quality of Experience becomes even harder, as the existing metrics perform poorly.
KW - Network impaired videos
KW - No-reference video quality
KW - Quality of experience
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84976412548&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1108/IJPCC-01-2016-0008
DO - 10.1108/IJPCC-01-2016-0008
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:84976412548
VL - 12
SP - 66
EP - 86
JO - International journal of pervasive computing and communications
JF - International journal of pervasive computing and communications
SN - 1742-7371
IS - 1
ER -