Stephen Wolf and Margaret H. Pinson

Abstract: Many organizations have focused on developing digital video quality metrics which produce results that accurately emulate subjective responses. However, to be widely applicable a metric must also work over a wide range of quality, and be useful for in-service quality monitoring. The Institute for Telecommunication Sciences (ITS) has developed spatial-temporal distortion metrics that meet all of these requirements. These objective metrics are described in detail and have a number of interesting properties, including utilization of 1) spatial activity filters which emphasize long edges on the order of 1/5 degree while simultaneously performing large amounts of noise suppression, 2) the angular direction of the spatial gradient, 3) spatial-temporal compression factors of at least 384:1 (spatial compression of at least 64:1 and temporal compression of at least 6:1, and 4) simple perceptibility thresholds and spatial-temporal masking functions. Results are presented that compare the objective metric values with mean opinion scores from a wide range of subjective data bases spanning many different scenes, systems, bit-rates, and applications.

Keywords: objective; subjective; correlation; in-service; video quality metrics; spatial; temporal; compression

Disclaimer: Certain commercial equipment, components, and software may be identified in this report to specify adequately the technical aspects of the reported results. In no case does such identification imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, nor does it imply that the equipment or software identified is necessarily the best available for the particular application or uses.

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