Video quality assessment using subjective and objective metrics

Since past few years, quality assessment of digital videos has acquired a lot of attention in the video processing community, leading to the growth of different 2D and 3D objective metrics for images and videos. Some of these metrics correlate quite well with the Human Visual System (HVS), while some do not. Most of the popular objective metrics do not perfectly correlate with the HVS. This correlation can be measured by the opinion scores based on observations of human subjects. In this thesis, we extensively study about Video Quality Assessment and complexity of HVS by proposing a method which helps us to find the best correlation between HVS and the objective metrics. The motive behind this work is to to introduce an objective metric that is adequate to predict the MOS (Mean Opinion Score) of distorted video sequences based on the FR (Full Reference) method, keeping in mind the benchmark set by the Video Quality Expert Group (VQEG). Subjective quality evaluation experiments using the human observers were performed, that is, a group of non-experts viewing the video sequences in original and distorted forms, as it is the human perception method which is evidently the most reliable one. Thereafter, objective test results, including the introduced metric, called PQM (Perceptual Quality Metric), and several other state-of-art metrics, are compared with MOS provided by human subjects. These comparisons elucidate the level of correlation between tested objective metrics and MOS. As an ultimate objective, we show the accuracy and monotonicity of various quality metrics, including PQM. The results obtained show that the PQM is better correlated with the human subjective judgement.