Toward Developing a Unit of Measure and Scale of Digital Video Quality: IEEE Broadcast Technology Society Subcommittee on Video Compression Measurements

Published

January 1, 2000

Author(s)

John M. Libert, L. Stanger, A. B. Watson, A. M. Rohaly

Abstract

Development of video quality metrics has taken support from experimental vision data mainly at two levels of abstraction. On the one hand are the carefully controlled tests of human visual response to well-defined, controlled visual stimuli, such as the ModelFest study. On the other hand are experiments in which viewers rate the global quality of natural video sequences exhibiting impairments of loosely controlled composition and amplitude, as in the Video Quality Experts Group study. The IEEE Broadcast Technology Society Subcommittee on Video Compression Measurements has initiated an intermediate level approach to video quality assessment aimed toward developing a scale of video impairment and unit of measure by which to describe video distortion in both perceptual and engineering terms. The proposed IEEE study will attempt to define a scale of video impairment in terms of multiple measurements of the just-noticeable-difference (JND) of compression-induced video impairments. A paired comparison psychophysical method will be used to define a psychometric function of the visual sensitivity to compression-induced video impairments at varying amplitudes. In this effort, quality assessment is related directly to visual perception of video impairments rather than of the more atomic visual stimuli as used in many human vision experiments, yet the experimenters' control over the stimuli is greater than that used in much of the contemporary video quality testing.

Proceedings Title

Proc. Intl. Soc. for Optical Engineering (SPIE), Conf. on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging V

Volume

3959

Conference Dates

January 24-27, 2000

Conference Location

San Jose, CA

Pub Type

Conferences

Download Paper

Local Download

Keywords

IEEE standards, JND, numerical category scaling, video compression measurements, video fidelity, video quality

Citation

Libert, J. , Stanger, L. , Watson, A. and Rohaly, A. (2000), Toward Developing a Unit of Measure and Scale of Digital Video Quality: IEEE Broadcast Technology Society Subcommittee on Video Compression Measurements, Proc. Intl. Soc. for Optical Engineering (SPIE), Conf. on Human Vision and Electronic Imaging V, San Jose, CA, [online], https://tsapps.nist.gov/publication/get_pdf.cfm?pub_id=25179 (Accessed October 17, 2025)