Impact of Jitter and Jerkiness on Perceived Video Quality

In the transmission of digitally compressed video, a very important source of impairments comes from the delivery of the video stream over an error-prone channel. Partial loss or partial corruption of information can have a dramatic impact on user’s perceived quality because a localized distortion within a frame can spatially and temporally propagate over frames. The visual impact of such losses varies between video decoders depending on their ability to deal with corrupted streams. Some decoders will choose to entirely discard the frame that has corrupted or missing information and repeat the previous video frame instead, until the next valid decoded frame is available. Encoders can also drop frames during a sudden increase of motion in the content because the target encoding bit rate is too low. In this paper, we investigate the perceptual impact of repeated and dropped video frames on perceived quality.