Dwight Melcher and Stephen Wolf

Abstract: Describes an algorithm for (1) quantifying the spatial gradients or edges in an image as a function of angle or orientation, (2) extracting low bandwidth features from these input and corresponding output spatial gradient images, and (3) deriving objective video quality metrics from these low bandwidth features that quantify the amount of tiling (i.e., blocking) and blurring in the output image. Examples are given for images that have been compressed by MPEG and video teleconferencing codecs.

Keywords: digital; performance; video; quality; objective; impairments; blocking; Testing; spatial; compression; scene; MPEG; tiling; teleconferencing; codecs

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