L/sub /spl infin//-based distortion measure for blocking artifacts in digital video

A quantitative distortion measure is proposed in this paper to measure the blocking artifact, which is a common problem in block-based coding mechanisms used in various digital image and video coding standards. The quantitative distortion measure, called Generalized Block-edge Impairment Metric (GBIM), has been improved by incorporating human perceptual characteristics based on local statistics and L/sub /spl infin// distortion measure along the block boundaries of a digitally compressed video image. This Improved Block-edge Impairment Metric (IBIM(L/sub /spl infin//)) gives results which are consistent and highly correlated with subjective evaluations.