New tools for evaluating the quality of digital television-results of the MOSAIC project

The understanding of perceived television picture quality has advanced to the point at which we can meaningfully address the issue of quality in digitally compressed television, largely due to work within the European MOSAIC project, which was managed jointly by the Independent Television Commission and the European Broadcasting Union. This paper reviews the developments in subjective quality evaluation and engineering practice in this area. In particular, it leads to a working definition, or a methodology, by which digitally compressed picture quality can be meaningfully characterised and related to the existing and well established analogue grading scales.