The Development of a Synthetic Colour Test Image for Subjective and Objective Quality Assessment of Digital Codecs

Subjective and objective quality measures are required for monitoring image and video systems. Our aim is to develop a static colour test image for digital codec and video system evaluation that is analogous to the colour bar signal commonly used in analogue television broadcasting. This approach is capable of highlighting coding colour artefacts, and enables both subjective and objective evaluation. The effectiveness of the developed test image is demonstrated using a JPEG codec. Three objective quality metrics are proposed of which two have been linked to the conventional vectorscope used in analogue television systems