Reduced-reference video quality assessment using discriminative local harmonic strength with motion consideration

This paper presents a reduced-reference objective picture quality measurement tool of compressed video. We have used a discriminative analysis of harmonic strength computed from edge-detected pictures to create harmonics gain and loss information that could be associated with the picture. The harmonics gain/loss are derived through the harmonic analysis of the compressed and source pictures to be incorporated in the reduced-reference video quality meter. This information corresponds with the two most prominent compression distortions, namely blockiness and blurriness. We have also studied the impact of motion in a video sequence on these compression distortions and the way they should be weighted and combined to give the best objective quality metric model. The model has been calibrated using several video sequences with dominant blockiness and blurriness. Validation of the model is performed by applying the model to the 50 Hz video sequences of VQEG Test Phase-I. Our results show that the proposed model achieves good correlations with the subjective evaluations of the VQEG datasets and its performance is comparable to those of the full-reference models in the literature.