Only-Reference Video Quality Assessment for Video Coding Using Convolutional Neural Network

Conventional video quality assessment methods are either full-, reduced-, or no-reference methods that need to access decoded videos. Hence, to calculate quality of decoded video in video coding regarding an image/video quality metric, complete encoding and decoding have to executed, which is computationally expensive. To address this problem, we propose to estimate quality of decoded videos from the original video only (i.e., only-reference) using convolutional neural network, as if the original video is encoded using a range of quantization parameter. The proposed network is shallow and can be trained to estimate various video quality metrics. Furthermore, among potential rate control applications using the proposed network, we demonstrate achieving a targeted decoded-video quality by selecting a proper quantization parameter before actually encoding.