Hybrid No-Reference Video Quality Assessment Focusing on Codec Effects

Currently, the development of multimedia communication has progressed so rapidly that the video program service has become a requirement for ordinary customers. The quality of experience (QoE) for the visual signal is of the fundamental importance for numerous image and video processing applications, where the goal of video quality assessment (VQA) is to automatically measure the quality of the visual signal in agreement with the human judgment of the video quality. Considering the codec effect to the video quality, in this paper an efficient non-reference (NR) VQA algorithm is proposed which estimates the video quality (VQ) only by utilizing the distorted video signal at the destination. The VQA feature vectors (FVs) which have high relationships with the subjective quality of the distorted video are investigated, and a hybrid NR VQA (HNRVQA) function is established by considering the multiple FVs. The simulation results, testing on the SDTV programming provided by VCEG Phase I, show that the proposed algorithm can represent the VQ accurately, and it can be used to replace the subjective VQA to measure the quality of the video signal automatically at the destinations.