A New Reference Free Approach for the Quality Assessment of MPEG Coded Videos

Currently, the growing of digital video delivery leads to compress at high ratio, the video sequences. Different coding algorithms like MPEG-4 introduce different artifacts (blocking, blurring, ringing) degrading the perceptual video quality. Such impairments are generally exploited by the No-Reference quality assessment. In this paper, we propose to use the principal distortions introduced by MPEG-4 coding to design a new reference free metric. Using the frequency and space features of each image, a distortion measure for blocking, blurring and ringing effects is computed respectively. On the one hand, the blocking measure and on the other hand, a joint measure of blurring and ringing effects are perceptually validated, which assures the relevance of distortion measures. To produce the final quality score, a new pooling model is also proposed. High correlation between the objective scores of the proposed metric and the subjective assessment ratings has been achieved.