Power of tempospatially unified spectral density for perceptual video quality assessment

We propose a perceptual video quality assessment (PVQA) metric for distorted videos by analyzing the power spectral density (PSD) of a group of pictures. This is an estimation approach that relies on the changes in video dynamic calculated in the frequency domain and are primarily caused by distortion. We obtain a feature map by processing a 3D PSD tensor obtained from a set of distorted frames. This is a full-reference tempospatial approach that considers both temporal and spatial PSD characteristics. This makes it ubiquitously suitable for videos with varying motion patterns and spatial contents. Our technique does not make any assumptions on the coding conditions, streaming conditions or distortion. This approach is also computationally inexpensive which makes it feasible for real-time and practical implementations. We validate our proposed metric by testing it on a variety of distorted sequences from PVQA databases. The results show that our metric estimates the perceptual quality at the sequence level accurately. We report the correlation coefficients with the differential mean opinion scores (DMOS) reported in the databases. The results show high and competitive correlations compared with the state of the art techniques.