Validating Objective Measures of MPEG Video Quality

In 1996, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) adopted ANSI T1.801.03, which presents a number of new objective video quality metrics for quantifying the effects of digital compression and transmission impairments. The measurements in ANSI T1.801.03 were selected based on an extensive multilaboratory quality assessment study that included video systems from bit rates of 64 kbits/sec to 45 Mbits/sec and video test scenes that spanned a wide range of spatial and temporal coding difficulties. The set of objective video quality measurements effectively accounted for subjective judgments by human viewers. While 25 video systems were tested, this multilaboratory study did not include MPEG video systems and did not cover any bit rates between 1.6 and 10 Mbits/sec. This paper presents the results from two MPEG studies designed to fill in the bit-rate gap in the previous multilaboratory study.