A new perceptual quality metric for compressed video based on mean squared error

A full reference objective quality metric that predicts perceived quality of compressed video is proposed. The metric estimates the mean opinion score (MOS) based on spatio-temporal activity and the mean squared error (MSE) between original and compressed video sequences. The proposed metric has been tested on multimedia sequences of common intermediate format (CIF) resolution compressed at a wide range of bit rates using the H264/AVC coding standard. This metric shows a higher correlation with subjective quality ratings (MOS) than popular metrics such as peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), video structural similarity metric (VSSIM), national telecommunication and information administration’s video quality metric (NTIA/ITS VQM) and PSNRplus. This algorithm is particularly useful for real-time quality estimation of multimedia sequences compressed using block-based video coding schemes and all the parameters of the metric can be calculated automatically with a modest amount of processing overhead.