Subjective and objective quality assessment for H264 compressed medical video sequences

Nowadays, lossy compression is becoming increasingly important for storage and transmission, of hunger amounts of numerical date, especially in the medical field. However, the loss of information involved by this kind of compression can be considered as risky in particular for medical applications like diagnosis. To minimize this risk a balance should be done between compression efficiency and experts´ perceived quality by running subjective quality assessment for compressed medical data. In this study, we address this issue and we deal with this problem by determining H264 compression bitrate thresholds for full HD ENT medical sequences. We show that this type of video could be lossy encoded up to a ratio threshold ranging from 100:1 to 270:1 with maintaining practitioners´ satisfaction. Objective results showed us finally, that the use of quality assessment algorithms such as MSE, NIQE, NQM, SSIM, MSSIM and BRISQUE, could be helpful to compute realistic compression ratios and could, thus, validate human perception.