MDVQM: A novel multidimensional no-reference video quality metric for video transcoding

In this paper, we study the impact of quantization, frame dropping and spatial down-sampling on the perceived quality of compressed video streams. Based on the analysis of quality ratings obtained from extensive subjective tests, we propose a no-reference metric (named MDVQM) for video quality estimation in the presence of both spatial and temporal quality impairments. The proposed metric is based on the per-pixel bitrate of the encoded stream and selected spatial and temporal activity measures extracted from the video content. All the values required to compute the proposed video quality metric can be obtained without using the original reference video which makes the metric for instance useful for making transcoding decisions in a wireless video transmission scenario. Different from comparable metrics in the literature, we have also considered the case when both frame rate and frame size are changed simultaneously. The validation results show that the proposed metric provides more accurate estimation of the video quality than the state of the art metrics. (C) 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.