No-reference quality estimation for compressed videos based on inter-frame activity difference

This paper presents a no-reference (NR) based video-quality estimation method for compressed videos. The proposed method does not need bitstream information. Only pixel information is used for the quality estimation. An activity value which indicates a variance of luminance values is calculated for every given-size pixel block. The activity difference between an intra-coded frame and its adjacent frame is employed. In addition, blockiness and blur levels are also estimated at every frame and are taken into account. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves accurate video-quality estimation. The correlation coefficient between subjective quality and estimated quality is 0.925. The proposed method is suitable for automatic quality check when the original videos cannot be used.