A Perceptual Measure of Blocking Artifact for No-reference Video Quality Evaluation of H.264 Codec

In this paper, we propose a new, perceptually significant video quality metric to estimate the blocking effect caused by the H.264/MPEG-4 Advanced Video Coding (AVC) standard. Our method operates in the spatial domain by taking into account the local variation inside each 16 by 16 block. The proposed approach does not require high computational complexity and can be suitable for real-time evaluation. We evaluate the performance of the proposed method by using three common intermediate format sequences at different compression rates. The comparison of the obtained results was made with Suthaharan's technique using the IVP database. The performance metrics, Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients, indicate that the proposed method outperformed the approach recommended in the literature for block-based compression, and the improvement was even better for the H.264/MPEG-4 AVC standard.