ViS3: an algorithm for video quality assessment via analysis of spatial and spatiotemporal slices

Algorithms for video quality assessment (VQA) aim to estimate the qualities of videos in a manner that agrees with human judgments of quality. Modern VQA algorithms often estimate video quality by comparing localized space-time regions or groups of frames from the reference and distorted videos, using comparisons based on visual features, statistics, and/or perceptual models. We present a VQA algorithm that estimates quality via separate estimates of perceived degradation due to (1) spatial distortion and (2) joint spatial and temporal distortion. The first stage of the algorithm estimates perceived quality degradation due to spatial distortion; this stage operates by adaptively applying to groups of spatial video frames the two strategies from the most apparent distortion algorithm with an extension to account for temporal masking. The second stage of the algorithm estimates perceived quality degradation due to joint spatial and temporal distortion; this stage operates by measuring the dissimilarity between the reference and distorted videos represented in terms of two-dimensional spatiotemporal slices. Finally, the estimates obtained from the two stages are combined to yield an overall estimate of perceived quality degradation. Testing on various video-quality databases demonstrates that our algorithm performs well in predicting video quality and is competitive with current state-of-the-art VQA algorithms. © 2014 SPIE and IS&T [DOI: 10.1117/1.JEI.23.1.013016]