End-user video-quality estimation based on a Reduced-Reference model employing activity-difference for IPTV services

This paper presents a reduced-reference based video quality estimation method suitable for individual end-user quality monitoring of IPTV services. With the proposed method, activity values (spatial frequency levels) for individual given-size pixel blocks of an original video are transmitted to end-user terminals. At the end-user terminals, the video quality of a received video is estimated on the basis of the activity-difference between the original video and the received video. Psychovisual weighting with respect to the activity-difference is also applied to improve estimation accuracy. In addition, low-bit-rate transmission is achieved by using temporal sub-sampling and by transmitting only the lower 6 bits of each activity value. The proposed method achieves accurate video quality estimation using only low-bit-rate original video information (15kbps for SDTV). The correlation coefficient between actual subjective video quality and estimated quality is 0.909.