Spatial Masking and Perceived Video Quality in Multimedia Applications

In modern communication systems with video transmission as their important part, objective video quality evaluation is necessary in the QoS (quality of service) assessment. This article analyzes spatial masking effects on the visibility of compression artifacts, and consequently its importance in the digital video quality evaluation process. Luminance masking and texture masking are mechanisms referred to as having a great influence on the objective quality metrics fidelity. Eleven maskers (6 for luminance and 5 for texture) are constructed, and their effectiveness is analyzed first for each masker alone, and then for combinations of luminance and texture maskers. By nonlinear addition of luminance and texture maskers used in a simple pixel-based quality metric a high correlation with subjective mean opinion scores (MOS) is obtained (Pearson correlation coefficient higher than 0.95).