Designing Video Quality Metrics

The focus of this book is on the design of video quality metrics with multi-way data analysis in general and not on the development of a particular metric itself. It is therefore not sensible to design a video quality metric highly optimised for a certain application. Yet in order to assess if multi-way data analysis provides an advantage in the design of video quality, two simple examples for no-reference video quality metrics are introduced in this chapter. They represent the main categories in the engineering approach to video quality metrics: one bitstream-based and one pixel-based video quality metric. The first example describes how a video quality metric can be designed with H.264/AVC bitstream-based no-reference features, suitable for the visual quality estimation of H.264/AVC encoded video sequences. The second example describes a more universal approach, utilizing only pixel-based no-reference features and is thus also suitable for other coding technologies, as the features are selected with respect to generally occurring coding artefacts.