Stephen Wolf and Margaret H. Pinson

Abstract: This paper summarizes results from an experiment whose goal was to assess whether the NTIA General Video Quality Metric (VQM) is an acceptable objective metric for measuring High Definition TV (HDTV) video quality. The HDTV subjective test that was performed to evaluate the NTIA General VQM contained 60 30-second video clips that were rated using the Single Stimulus Continuous Quality Evaluation (SSCQE) method. The 60 clips included twelve 1080i HDTV originals and 48 processed versions of these originals from 16 different video systems. The video systems included 5 different HDTV codecs running at bit rates from 2 to 19 Mbps and broadcast transmission errors (i.e., RF transmission with poor signal-to-noise-ratio). Excellent objective-to-subjective correlation results for this experiment demonstrate the potential application of the NTIA General VQM to HDTV quality monitoring.

Keywords: video quality; metrics; video calibration; digital video; objective video quality performance

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