No-Reference Estimation of the Coding PSNR for H.264-Coded Sequences

In this article an algorithm for the evaluation of the picture quality of H.264-coded video sequences is introduced. As a measure of picture quality the peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) is used. While the computation of the PSNR usually considers a reference signal in comparison to the distorted video sequence, the proposed algorithm uses the coded transform coefficients to estimate the PSNR in a statistical maimer. Thus, no reference signal is needed.

I. Introduction

During the last years various approaches have been developed to measure the quality of compressed pictures and video sequences. The outcome of this research was a variety of different algorithms, some of which capable of determining a quality value with a high correlation compared to the perceived quality. This could be shown by comparisons to the results of subjective tests. Basically, those algorithms can be divided into three groups.