METHOD AND APPARATUS FOR ESTIMATING DIGITAL VIDEO QUALITY WITHOUT USING A REFERENCE VIDEO

摘要

A method and apparatus for performing image quality assessment that does not require the use or availability of a reference image. The apparatus (100) comprises a vision pre-processor (300), a virtual reference generator (304), a virtual distortion generator (306), and an image quality metric generator (308). The vision preprocessor (300) performs a vision-like transformation upon an input image sequence to produce a vision energy map. The virtual reference generator (304) operates upon the vision energy map to produce a virtual reference while the virtual distortion generator (306) produces distortion estimates that are use by the virtual reference generator to produce the virtual reference. The virtual distortion and virtual reference are used by the image quality metric generator (308) to produce an image quality metric for the input video sequence without the use of a reference video sequence.