No-reference quality assessment of HEVC videos in loss-prone networks

In this paper, we propose a no-reference quality assessment measure for high efficiency video coding (HEVC). We analyze the impact of network losses on HEVC videos and the resulting error propagation. We estimate channel-induced distortion in the video assuming we have access to the decoded video only without access to the bitstream or the decoder. Our model does not make any assumptions on the coding conditions, network loss patterns or error concealment techniques. The proposed approach relies only on the temporal variations of the power spectrum across the decoded frames. We validate our proposed quality measure by testing it on a variety of HEVC coded videos subject to network losses. Our simulation results show that the proposed model accurately captures channel-induced distortions. For the test videos, the correlation coefficients between the proposed measure and the full-reference SSIM values range between 0.70 and 0.80.