No-Reference Image Quality Analysis for Compressed Video Sequences

This article presents a study about the visibility of compression artifacts in natural images. The visibility of compression artifacts is determined by viewing experiments. The experiments show a strong correlation between the visibility of compression artifacts and the spatial activity of the images. Furthermore, the article introduces an approach to measure the image quality with regards to the human perception. The approach is based on the PSNR extended by a spatial activity indicator. Its benefits are proven by subjective tests.