Video Quality Assessment Model Research Articles

No-Reference Video Quality Assessment Based on Visual Memory Modeling

Objective video quality assessment plays an important role in a variety of video processing applications such as video compression, transmission, visualization, and display. This paper proposes a no-reference video quality assessment model based on visual memory understanding. Inspired by the findings of neuroscience researchers, who argue there is a large overlap between the active human brain area when performing video quality assessment and saliency detection tasks, saliency maps are employed here to assist the quality assessment. To this end, we first generate the saliency maps using CLBP (Complete Local Binary Patterns) features of the residual frames. Then, a model of visual memory is created from the statistics of saliency maps. This is followed by learning the video quality from the visual memory, saliency, and frame features through a support vector regression pipeline. The experimental results on the state-of-the-art LIVE and SJTU video datasets indicate that the proposed no-reference video quality assessment algorithm is effective and performs statistically better than several other state-of-the-art approaches.

Screen Content Video Quality Assessment: Subjective and Objective Study.

In this paper, we make the first attempt to study the subjective and objective quality assessment for the screen content videos (SCVs). For that, we construct the first large-scale video quality assessment (VQA) database specifically for the SCVs, called the screen content video database (SCVD). This SCVD provides 16 reference SCVs, 800 distorted SCVs, and their corresponding subjective scores, and it is made publicly available for research usage. The distorted SCVs are generated from each reference SCV with 10 distortion types and 5 degradation levels for each distortion type. Each distorted SCV is rated by at least 32 subjects in the subjective test. Furthermore, we propose the first full-reference VQA model for the SCVs, called the spatiotemporal Gabor feature tensor-based model (SGFTM), to objectively evaluate the perceptual quality of the distorted SCVs. This is motivated by the observation that 3D-Gabor filter can well stimulate the visual functions of the human visual system (HVS) on perceiving videos, being more sensitive to the edge and motion information that are often-encountered in the SCVs. Specifically, the proposed SGFTM exploits 3D-Gabor filter to individually extract the spatiotemporal Gabor feature tensors from the reference and distorted SCVs, followed by measuring their similarities and later combining them together through the developed spatiotemporal feature tensor pooling strategy to obtain the final SGFTM score. Experimental results on SCVD have shown that the proposed SGFTM yields a high consistency on the subjective perception of SCV quality and consistently outperforms multiple classical and state-of-the-art image/video quality assessment models.

Stereoscopic Video Quality Assessment Using Oriented Local Gravitational Force Statistics

We develop a new no-reference (NR) stereoscopic video quality assessment model that adopts oriented local gravitational force (OLGF) statistics in the space-time domain. The OLGF is a novel extension of an existing local gravitational force descriptor and includes two new components: relative local gravitational force magnitude and relative local gravitational force orientation. The resulting algorithm, called Stereoscopic Video Integrity Predictor using OLGF Statistics (SVIPOS), first uses our previous work to generate a cyclopean image and a product image in spatial domain from a stereoscopic video sequence pair, and calculates a frame difference image in temporal domain from a left video sequence. Then the OLGF model is deployed to compute various local gravitational force responses on the cyclopean image, the product image and the frame difference image. Finally, a support vector regression is used to map statistical features extracted from the computed gravitational force responses to stereoscopic video quality predications. SVIPOS is thoroughly tested on three publicly stereoscopic video quality databases. The experimental results show that SVIPOS outperforms state-of-the-art stereoscopic video quality methods.

Quality Assessment for Video With Degradation Along Salient Trajectories

With the rapid growth of digital video through the Internet, a reliable objective video-quality assessment (VQA) algorithm is in great demand for video management. Motion information plays a dominant role for video perception, and the human visual system (HVS) is able to track moving objects effectively with eye movement. Moreover, the middle temporal area of the brain is selective for moving objects with particular velocities. In other words, visual contents that are along the motion trajectories will automatically attract our attention for dedicated processing. Inspired by the motion-related process in the HVS, we suggest analyzing the degradation along attended motion trajectories for VQA. The characteristic of motion velocity along each trajectory is analyzed for temporal quality measurement. Meanwhile, visual information along each trajectory is extracted for joint spatial-temporal quality measurement. Finally, considering the spatial-quality degradation from each frame, a novel full-reference assessor along salient trajectories (FAST) for VQA (which combines the spatial, temporal, and joint spatial-temporal quality degradations) is introduced. Experimental results on five publicly available VQA databases demonstrate that the proposed FAST VQA model performs consistently with the subjective perception. The source code of the proposed method is available at http://web.xidian.edu.cn/wjj/paper.html .

Bitrate-Based No-Reference Video Quality Assessment Combining the Visual Perception of Video Contents

In video communication, the quality of video is mainly determined by bitrate in general. Moreover, the effect of video contents and their visual perception on video quality assessment (VQA) is often overlooked. However, in fact, for different videos, although the bitrates are the same, their VQA scores are still significantly different. Hence, it is assumed that the bitrate, video contents, and human visual characteristics mainly affect the VQA. Based on the above three aspects, in this paper, we designed a bitrate-based no-reference (NR) VQA metric combining the visual perception of video contents, namely, BRVPVC. In this metric, first an initial VQA model was proposed by only considering the bitrate alone. Then, the visual perception model for video contents was designed based on the texture complexity and local contrast of image, temporal information of video, and their visual perception features. Finally, two models were synthesized by adding certain weight coefficients into an overall VQA metric, namely, BRVPVC. Furthermore, ten reference videos and 150 distorted videos in the LIVE video database were used to test the metric. Moreover, based on the results of evaluating the videos in LIVE, VQEG, IRCCyN, EPFL-PoliMI, IVP, CSIQ, and Lisbon databases, the performance of BRVPVC is respectively compared with that of six full-reference (FR) metrics and ten NR VQA metrics. The results show that our VQA metric has a higher accuracy than six common FR VQA metrics and eight NR VQA metrics, and it is close to other two NR VQA metrics in accuracy. The corresponding values of Pearson linear correlation coefficient and Spearman rank order correlation coefficient reached 0.8547 and 0.8260, respectively. In addition, the computational complexity of proposed VQA metric is lower than video signal-to-noise ratio, video quality model, motion-based video integrity evaluation, spatiotemporal most apparent distortion, V-BLINDS, and V-CORNIA metrics. Moreover, the proposed metric has a better generalization property than these metrics.

IPTV video quality assessment model based on neural network

In recent years, with the continuous development of network science and technology and the continuous promotion of “three networks convergence”, IPTV (Interactive Network Television) has shown a rapid development trend. IPTV is different from the traditional one-way broadcasting mode of television, it can achieve interaction with the audience, and provide more personalized and diversified videos. With the rapid development of new media, massive video resources and a large number of video-related information are sweeping in. The evaluation of video can no longer be limited to the ratings of traditional platforms. Video playback on new media platforms, network impact, video content and other related data are also important indicators affecting video evaluation. Video quality is closely related to video content characteristics. Different videos have different sensitivity to the same packet loss rate. The IPTV video quality evaluation model based on content features considers the video content characteristics. Firstly, the QP, bit rate and motion vector (MV) information of the video is obtained by analyzing the video stream. Then, the time complexity of the video is calculated by using the obtained MV, and the spatial complexity of the video is calculated by quantization parameters and bit rate. Videos are classified by clustering analysis. On this basis, the BP neural network is used to establish the model and evaluate the video quality, so as to better reflect the visual perception of the human eye. The model has low computational complexity and is suitable for IPTV video quality assessment with certain computing power in network nodes.

An improved model for no-reference image quality assessment and a no-reference video quality assessment model based on frame analysis

No-reference image quality assessment (NR-IQA) uses only the test image for its quality assessment, and as video is essentially comprised of image frames with additional temporal dimension, video quality assessment (VQA) requires a thorough understanding of image quality assessment metrics and models. Therefore, in order to identify features that deteriorate video quality, a fundamental analysis of spatial and temporal artifacts with respect to individual video frames needs to be performed. Existing IQA and VQA metrics are primarily for capturing few distortions and hence may not be good for all types of images and videos. In this paper, we propose an NR-IQA model by combining existing three methods (namely NIQE, BRISQUE and BLIINDS-II) using multi-linear regression. We also present a holistic no-reference video quality assessment (NR-VQA) model by exploring quantification of certain distortions like ringing, frame difference, blocking, clipping and contrast in video frames. For the proposed NR-IQA model, the results represent improved performance as compared to the state-of-the-art methods and it requires very low fraction of samples for training to provide a consistent accuracy over different training-to-testing ratios. The performance of NR-VQA model is examined using a simple neural network model to attain high value of goodness of fit.

Practical Evaluation of VMAF Perceptual Video Quality for WebRTC Applications

WebRTC is the umbrella term for several emergent technologies aimed to exchange real-time media in the Web. Like other media-related services, the perceived quality of WebRTC communication can be measured using Quality of Experience (QoE) indicators. QoE assessment methods can be classified as subjective (users’ evaluation scores) or objective (models computed as a function of different parameters). In this paper, we focus on VMAF (Video Multi-method Assessment Fusion), which is an emergent full-reference objective video quality assessment model developed by Netflix. VMAF is typically used to assess video streaming services. This paper evaluates the use of VMAF in a different type of application: WebRTC. To that aim, we present a practical use case built on the top of well-known open source technologies, such as JUnit, Selenium, Docker, and FFmpeg. In addition to VMAF, we also calculate other objective QoE video metrics such as Visual Information Fidelity in the pixel domain (VIFp), Structural Similarity (SSIM), or Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) applied to a WebRTC communication in different network conditions in terms of packet loss. Finally, we compare these objective results with a subjective evaluation using a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) scale to the same WebRTC streams. As a result, we found a strong correlation of the subjective video quality perceived in WebRTC video calls with the objective results computed with VMAF and VIFp in comparison with SSIM and PSNR and their variants.

A Subjective and Objective Study of Stalling Events in Mobile Streaming Videos

Over-the-top mobile adaptive video streaming is invariably influenced by volatile network conditions, which can cause playback interruptions (stalling or rebuffering events) and bitrate fluctuations, thereby impairing users’ quality of experience (QoE). Video quality assessment models that can accurately predict users’ QoE under such volatile network conditions are rapidly gaining attention, since these methods could enable more efficient design of quality control protocols for media-driven services such as YouTube, Amazon, Netflix, and many others. However, the development of improved QoE prediction models requires data sets of videos afflicted with diverse stalling events that have been labeled with ground-truth subjective opinion scores. Toward this end, we have created a new mobile video quality database that we call LIVE Mobile Stall Video Database-II. Our database contains a total of 174 videos afflicted with distortions caused by 26 different stalling patterns. We describe the way we simulated the diverse stalling events to create a corpus of distorted videos, and we detail the human study we conducted to obtain continuous-time subjective scores from 54 subjects. We also present the outcomes of our comprehensive analysis of the impact of several factors that influence subjective QoE, and report the performance of existing QoE-prediction models on our data set. We are making the database (videos, subjective data, and video metadata) publicly available in order to help the advance state-of-the-art research on user-centric mobile network planning and management. The database may be accessed at http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/LIVEStallStudy/liveMobile.html .

Video quality assessment accounting for temporal visual masking of local flicker

An important element of the design of video quality assessment (VQA) models that remains poorly understood is the effect of temporal visual masking on the visibility of temporal distortions. The visibility of temporal distortions like local flicker can be strongly reduced by motion. Based on a recently discovered visual change silencing illusion, we have developed a full reference VQA model that accounts for temporal visual masking of local flicker. The proposed model, called Flicker Sensitive-MOtion-based Video Integrity Evaluation (FS-MOVIE), augments the well-known MOVIE Index by combining motion tuned video integrity features with a new perceptual flicker visibility/masking index. FS-MOVIE captures the separated spectral signatures caused by local flicker distortions, by using a model of the responses of neurons in primary visual cortex to video flicker, an energy model of motion perception, and a divisive normalization stage. FS-MOVIE predicts the perceptual suppression of local flicker by the presence of motion and evaluates local flicker as it affects video quality. Experimental results show that FS-MOVIE significantly improves VQA performance against its predecessor and is highly competitive with top performing VQA algorithms when tested on the LIVE, IVP, EPFL, and VQEGHD5 VQA databases.

Video quality assessment based on motion structure partition similarity of spatiotemporal slice images

Video quality assessment (VQA) is becoming increasingly important as a comprehensive measure of video quality. This paper proposes a full-reference VQA (FR-VQA) algorithm based on the motion structure partition similarity of spatiotemporal slice (STS) images. To achieve this objective, a number of FR-image quality assessment algorithms were applied slice by slice to video STS images to compare their performance of detecting structure similarity of STS images. The algorithm that performed the best was selected to detect the similarity between motion-partitioning STS images. Next, as motion objects in the video sequence were found to have different influences on the prediction performance in terms of moving speed and track, the STS images were divided into simple and complex motion regions, and their contributions to the VQA task determined. Consequently, a promising effective and efficient VQA model, called STS-MSPS, is also proposed. Experimental evaluations conducted based on various annotated VQA databases indicate that the proposed STS-MSPS achieves state-of-the-art prediction performances in terms of correlations with subjective evaluation and statistical significance tests. This paper also shows that STS images by themselves provide sufficient information for VQA tasks and that the proposed complex motion region of an STS image is predominantly responsible for yielding a high-precision model.

Modelling user quality of experience from objective and subjective data sets using fuzzy logic

One of the paramount research questions in the scientific community today is how to remotely assess user quality of experience (QoE) for a specific service. To this end, various user QoE assessment models have been developed; however, they are mostly based on the data gathered from controlled environment experimentation. The aim of this research was to model user QoE for the User Datagram Protocol-based video streaming service from the results of uncontrolled subjective tests. Specifically, using fuzzy logic, we have correlated the values of three objective network parameters (the packet loss rate and the number and duration of packet loss occurrences in one streaming session) with test subjects’ subjective perception about perceived quality distortions. The dependencies between different values of the parameters and the subjects’ perception of video quality were used to develop a no reference objective video quality assessment model for assessing user QoE. The key distinguishing feature of the developed model lays in the process of subjective evaluation, which was conducted with a panel of 602 test subjects who evaluated the quality of 1-h video in home environments. For this purpose, 72 different test sequences were prepared for rating. We showed that a strong positive linear relationship exists between the assessed QoE of the model and the Mean Opinion Scores of the subjects (a Pearson correlation coefficient equal to 0.8841).

SpEED-QA: Spatial Efficient Entropic Differencing for Image and Video Quality

Many image and video quality assessment (I/VQA) models rely on data transformations of image/video frames, which increases their programming and computational complexity. By comparison, some of the most popular I/VQA models deploy simple spatial bandpass operations at a couple of scales, making them attractive for efficient implementation. Here we design reduced-reference image and video quality models of this type that are derived from the high-performance reduced reference entropic differencing (RRED) I/VQA models. A new family of I/VQA models, which we call the spatial efficient entropic differencing for quality assessment (SpEED-QA) model, relies on local spatial operations on image frames and frame differences to compute perceptually relevant image/video quality features in an efficient way. Software for SpEED-QA is available at: http://live.ece.utexas.edu/research/Quality/SpEED_Demo.zip.

Video quality assessment by compact representation of energy in 3D-DCT domain

Video quality assessment (VQA) aims to predict the perceptual quality for improving the performance of practical application systems. However, the traditional methods consider the video as a sequence of two-dimensional images, which conflicts with the fact that a video signal is a three-dimensional volume data. This operation ignores the temporal information and results in a poor consistency with human perception. Hence, the paper presents a novel VQA model by exploring and exploiting the compact representation of energy in the three-dimensional discrete cosine transform (3D-DCT) domain. First, the video is transformed by 3D-DCT for every group of frame (GOF). Then three types of statistical features are derived from the 3D-DCT coefficients to represent energy compaction properties for simulating the process of human visual system (HVS). The parameters of the generalized Gaussian distribution (GGD) are estimated to imitate the marginal distribution of the 3D-DCT coefficients. Three energy ratios are calculated to depict how the video energy distributes over different frequency components. And the mean and variance value of absolute 3D-DCT coefficients are employed to measure the frequency variation of the video. Finally, the differences between the feature of reference video and the feature of distorted video are calculated to predict the quality score of the distorted video. Experimental results show that the proposed VQA method has a good consistency with human perception and is competitive with the state-of-the-art methods.

Hierarchical content importance-based video quality assessment for HEVC encoded videos transmitted over LTE networks

To improve the accuracy of assessment, many previous works take into account the video content. However, these previous works just only consider the video content, but do not consider the location and importance of the degraded content. Thus, this paper takes into account not only the video content, but also the location and importance of the degraded content, and proposes a hierarchical content importance-based video quality assessment. Firstly, we propose to use the hierarchical content importance-based frame degradation rate (HFDR) metric to quantify the importance of degraded content hierarchically. Secondly, we propose to use the intra random access point (IRAP) loss rate (ILR) metric to quantify the impact of IRAP. Finally, the proposed HFDR metric and ILR metric are subsequently used to develop an objective video quality assessment model. The experimental results show that the predicted mean opinion score (MOS) of the proposed method highly correlates with the actual MOS.

Compressed-domain-based no-reference video quality assessment model considering fast motion and scene change

Due to the variability of wireless channel state, video quality monitoring became very important for guaranteeing users' Quality of Experience (QoE). QoE presents the overall perceptual quality of service from the subjective users' perspective. However, because of diverse characteristics of video content, Human Visual System (HVS) cannot give the same attention to whole scene simultaneously when facing video sequence. In this paper, we proposed a video quality assessment model by considering the influence of fast motion and scene change. The motion change contribution factor and scene change contribution factor are defined to quantify the characteristics of video content, which is closely related to the users' QoE. Based on G.1070, our proposed model considers the influential factors of loss nature of video coding, variability of practical network and video features. Also, the proposed model owns low computational complexity due to the compressed domain approach for the estimation of the model parameters. Therefore, the video quality is assessed without fully decoding the video stream. The performance of our proposed model has been compared with five existing models and the results also shown that our model has high prediction accuracy closing to human perception.

The Influencing Factors of Network Packet Loss's Long-Range Dependence has Impacts on the Packet Loss Rate

In order to better establish no-reference video quality assessment model considering the network packet loss and further gain a better QoE evaluation to meet the needs of the user’s, so we build NS2+ MyEvalvid simulation platform to study the scale characteristic of the network packet loss, scale characteristic of packet loss through the influence of packet loss rate to influence QoE. The experimental results show that, packet loss processes has long-range dependence, the number of superimposed source N, shape parameter, Hurst parameter, the output link speed have impacts on long-range dependence. We came to the conclusion that when superimposed source N is more, shape parameter is smaller, Hurst parameter is bigger, the output link speed is smaller, packet loss’s long range dependence is larger, packet loss rate is high.

A Completely Blind Video Integrity Oracle.

Considerable progress has been made toward developing still picture perceptual quality analyzers that do not require any reference picture and that are not trained on human opinion scores of distorted images. However, there do not yet exist any such completely blind video quality assessment (VQA) models. Here, we attempt to bridge this gap by developing a new VQA model called the video intrinsic integrity and distortion evaluation oracle (VIIDEO). The new model does not require the use of any additional information other than the video being quality evaluated. VIIDEO embodies models of intrinsic statistical regularities that are observed in natural vidoes, which are used to quantify disturbances introduced due to distortions. An algorithm derived from the VIIDEO model is thereby able to predict the quality of distorted videos without any external knowledge about the pristine source, anticipated distortions, or human judgments of video quality. Even with such a paucity of information, we are able to show that the VIIDEO algorithm performs much better than the legacy full reference quality measure MSE on the LIVE VQA database and delivers performance comparable with a leading human judgment trained blind VQA model. We believe that the VIIDEO algorithm is a significant step toward making real-time monitoring of completely blind video quality possible.

Research on No-reference Video Quality Assessment Based on H.264/AVC Bitstream

It is an important part to efficiently evaluate the video quality for user experience in video systems. Traditional video evaluation criterion is strict for testing environment, and is not appropriate for real-time evaluation on network vid- eo. No-reference video quality assessment doesn't require any information of original video, which makes it meet the characteristics of high real-time evaluation on network video image quality and small resource reduction. By extracting key parameters distorted by characteristic video in H.264/AVC video stream flow including quantification parameter, en- coding rate and bits of each macro block of coding video, the paper establishes no-reference video quality assessment model from the space complexity and time complexity of video. For the model, not only the model is not complicated, and can meet the requirement of real-time quality assessment of video, the simulation test but also proves that the correlation between the algorithm and subjective assessment value is high, which meets visual perception feature of human eye.

Temporal Video Quality Model Accounting for Variable Frame Delay Distortions

We announce a new video quality model (VQM) that accounts for the perceptual impact of variable frame delays (VFD) in videos with demonstrated top performance on the laboratory for image and video engineering (LIVE) mobile video quality assessment (VQA) database. This model, called VQM_VFD, uses perceptual features extracted from spatial-temporal blocks spanning fixed angular extents and a long edge detection filter. VQM_VFD predicts video quality by measuring multiple frame delays using perception based parameters to track subjective quality over time. In the performance analysis of VQM_VFD, we evaluated its efficacy at predicting human opinions of visual quality. A detailed correlation analysis and statistical hypothesis testing show that VQM_VFD accurately predicts human subjective judgments and substantially outperforms top-performing image quality assessment and VQA models previously tested on the LIVE mobile VQA database. VQM_VFD achieved the best performance on the mobile and tablet studies of the LIVE mobile VQA database for simulated compression, wireless packet-loss, and rate adaptation, but not for temporal dynamics. These results validate the new model and warrant a hard release of the VQM_VFD algorithm. It is freely available for any purpose, commercial, or noncommercial at http://www.its.bldrdoc.gov/vqm/ .