Video-Quality Estimation Based on Reduced-Reference Model Employing Activity-Difference

This paper presents a Reduced-Reference based video quality estimation method suitable for individual end-user quality monitoring of IPTV services. With the proposed method, activity values (spatial frequency levels) for individual given-size pixel blocks of an original video are transmitted to end-user terminals. At the end-user terminals, the video quality of a received video is estimated on the basis of the activity-difference between the original video and the received video. Psychovisual weighting with respect to the activity-difference is also applied to improve estimation accuracy. In addition, lowbit-rate transmission is achieved by using temporal subsampling and by transmitting only the lower six bits of each activity value. The proposed method achieves accurate video quality estimation using only low-bit-rate original video information (15kbps for SDTV). The correlation coefficient between actual subjective video quality and estimated quality is 0.901 with 15 kbps side information.