The development and evaluation of an objective video quality assessment system that emulates human viewing panels

The Institute for Telecommunication Sciences is conducting research to develop an objective video quality assessment system that emulates human perception. The system should return results that agree closely with quality judgements made by a large panel of viewers. Such a system is valuable because it provides broadcasters, video engineers and standards organizations with a means for making meaningful video quality evaluations without convening viewer panels. The issue is timely because compressed digital video systems present new measurement questions that are largely unanswered. The authors describe the development procedure, present some results, and evaluate a prototype version of the video quality assessment system.<>