Single-ended objective quality assessment of DTV

The objective measurement of visual quality of DTV imagery may be performed in two basic ways: "double-ended" and "single-ended" methods. A "single-ended" method is generally used to assess the visual quality of a Digital TV signal when the original signal is not available (e.g. a studio receiving many contributions on digital links). This paper proposes a new "single-ended" system to objectively assess the visual quality of a DTV based on an method for which new technique of detection of the impairments and a temporal analysis of the quality level have been applied. This method tries to go beyond the limit of a bare 8x8 block structure and to look for the visibility of an impairment (here called "snow flakes") due to a temporal fluctuation of visual quality, typical of the MPEG GOP structure. Experimental results show a good behavior when low bit rate (1Mbps to 4Mbps) coded video signal are processed. Other experimental results at higher bit rate (5Mbps to 9Mbps) are also proposed, for which the results are more dependent on the image content.