Spatio-temporal salience based video quality assessment

It is important to design an effective and efficient objective metric of the video quality in video processing areas. The most reliable way is subjective evaluation, thus the most reasonable objective metric should adequately consider characteristics of the human visual system (HVS). Visual attention (VA) is one of the essential visual phenomena of HVS, the realization of which relies on the saliency of visual field. Moreover, the saliency of visual field has a great influence on recognition, memorization and subjective evaluation of the image. This paper explores the saliency of visual field for objective quality assessment of videos. The proposed method first uses the VA model to obtain visual saliency map of the distorted video, including color, intensity and motion. Then the salient map is used to weight a structural similarity map between the original and distorted videos to get the final value of the video quality. Experimental results prove that the proposed method achieves a good correlation with subjective valuation. ©2010 IEEE