<title>Charting image artifacts in digital image sequences using velocital information content</title>

Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper introduces a metric called Velocital Information Content (VIC) which is used to chart quality variationsin digital image sequences. Both spatially-based and temporally-based artifacts are charted using this single metric.VIC is based on the velocital information in each image. A mathematical formulation for VIC is shown along withits relation to the spatial and temporal information content. Some strengths and weaknesses of the VIC formulationare discussed. VIC is tested on some standard image sequences with various spatio-temporal attributes. VIC is also tested on a standard image sequence with various degrees of blurring using a linear blurring algorithm. Additionally, VIC is tested using standard sequences that have been processed through a digital transmission algorithm. Thetransmission algorithm is based on the discrete cosine transform (DCT), and thus introduces many of the knowndigital artifacts such as blocking. Finally, the ability of VIC to chart image artifacts is compared to a few othertraditional quality metrics. VIC offers a different role from traditional transmission-based quality metrics whichrequire two images: the original input image and degraded output image to calculate the quality metric. VICcan detect artifacts from a single image sequence by charting variations from the norm. Therefore, VIC offers ametric for judging the quality of the image frames prior to transmission, without a transmission system or withoutany knowledge of the higher quality image input. The differences between VIC and transmission-oriented quality