A visual quality evaluation method for telemedicine applications

We present a new approach for image and video quality evaluation in telemedicine applications, relying on the quality assessment of a pre-known reduced size logo embedded in an unused part of the medical ultrasound frame. The method is tested using two different objective metrics, namely: the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) and the Structural SIMilarity index (SSIM). Comparisons with subjective results in terms of Differential Mean Opinion Scores (DMOS) are also presented. We show that the presented method, not needing the original frame to predict the quality, achieves a high correlation with subjective results (more than 0.9) for the different quality metrics used. We also present relationships between the quality derived via the logo and via the original frame and we assess the overhead in data transmission resulting from the compressed logo data and its protection overhead.