Lightweight Quality Metric Based on No-Reference Bitstream for H.264/AVC Video

This paper proposes a quality metric based on a No-Reference Bitstream (NR-B) having least computational complexity for the assessment of the human-perceptual quality of H. 264 encoded video. The proposed NR-B method performs a modeling of encoding distortion with three bit-stream information (i.e. frame-rate, motion-vector, and quantization-parameter) that can be directly extractable from the encoded bitstream and does not require additional complex processing of final pictures. From performance evaluation using 165 compressed video sequences, the experiment results show that the proposed metric has a higher correlation with subjective quality than is achieved with other comparable methods.