Digital video quality metric based on human vision

The growth of digital video has given rise to a need for computational meth ods for evaluating the visual quality of digital video. We have developed a new digital video quality metric, which we call DVQ (digital video quality ) [A. B. Watson, in Human Vision, Visual Processing, and Digital Display VI II, Proc. SPIE 3299, 139-147 (1993)]. Here, we provide a brief description of the metric, and give a preliminary report on its performance. DVQ accept s a pair of digital video sequences, and computes a measure of the magnitud e of the visible difference between them. The metric is based on the discre te cosine transform. It incorporates aspects of early visual processing, in cluding light adaptation, luminance, and chromatic channels; spatial and te mporal filtering; spatial frequency channels; contrast masking; and probabi lity summation. It also includes primitive dynamics of light adaptation and contrast masking. We have applied the metric to digital video sequences co rrupted by various typical compression artifacts, and compared the results to quality ratings made by human observers. (C) 2001 SPIE and IS&T.