Video quality

Video quality is a characteristic of a video passed through a video transmission/processing system, a formal or informal measure of perceived video degradation (typically, compared to the original video). Video processing systems may introduce some amount of distortion or artifacts in the video signal, which negatively impacts the user's perception of a system. For many stakeholders such as content providers, service providers, and network operators, the assurance of video quality is an important task. Video quality is a characteristic of a video passed through a video transmission/processing system, a formal or informal measure of perceived video degradation (typically, compared to the original video). Video processing systems may introduce some amount of distortion or artifacts in the video signal, which negatively impacts the user's perception of a system. For many stakeholders such as content providers, service providers, and network operators, the assurance of video quality is an important task. Video quality evaluation is performed to describe the quality of a set of video sequences under study. Video quality can be evaluated objectively (by mathematical models) or subjectively (by asking users for their rating). Also, the quality of a system can be determined offline (i.e., in a laboratory setting for developing new codecs or services), or in-service (to monitor and ensure a certain level of quality). Since the world's first video sequence was recorded and transmitted, many video processing systems have been designed. Such systems encode video streams and transmit them over various kinds of networks or channels. In the ages of analog video systems, it was possible to evaluate the quality aspects of a video processing system by calculating the system's frequency response using test signals (for example, a collection of color bars and circles). Digital video systems have almost fully replaced analog ones, and quality evaluation methods have changed. The performance of a digital video processing and transmission system can vary significantly and depends, amongst others, on the characteristics of the input video signal (e.g. amount of motion or spatial details), the settings used for encoding and transmission, and the channel fidelity or network performance. Objective video quality models are mathematical models that approximate results from subjective quality assessment, in which human observers are asked to rate the quality of a video. In this context, the term model may refer to a simple statistical model in which several independent variables (e.g. the packet loss rate on a network and the video coding parameters) are fit against results obtained in a subjective quality evaluation test using regression techniques. A model may also be a more complicated algorithm implemented in software or hardware. The terms model and metric are often used interchangeably in the field. However a metric has certain mathematical properties, which, by strict definition, do not apply to all video quality models. The term “objective” relates to the fact that, in general, quality models are based on criteria that can be measured objectively – that is, free from human interpretation. They can be automatically evaluated by a computer program. Unlike a panel of human observers, an objective model should always deterministically output the same quality score for a given set of input parameters. Objective quality models are sometimes also referred to as instrumental (quality) models, in order to emphasize their application as measurement instruments. Some authors suggest that the term “objective” is misleading, as it “implies that instrumental measurements bear objectivity, which they only do in case that they can be generalized.” Objective models can be classified by the amount of information available about the original signal, the received signal, or whether there is a signal present at all: