Objective video quality metrics: A performance analysis

In the last years, the development of novel video coding technologies has spurred the interest in developing digital video communications. The definition of evaluation mechanisms to assess the quality of video will play a major role in the overall design of video communication systems. It is well-known that simple energy based metrics such as the Peak Signal Noise Ratio (PSNR) are not suitable to describe the subjective degradation perceived by a viewer. Recently, new video quality metrics have been proposed in the literature that emulates human perception of video quality since it produces results which are similar to those obtained from the subjective methods. The new models have higher prediction accuracy than the PSNR method, produce consistent results in the range of the data from the subjective tests and are stable across a varying range of video sequences. In this paper, we analyze the capabilities of these new quality measures when are applied to the most popular Hypothetical Reference Circuits (HRC) such as: video compression standards, bit-error transmissions and packet losses.