Reduced-reference quality assessment with scalable overhead for video with packet loss

Reduced-reference (RR) video quality assessment methods estimate the quality of a distorted video using only partial information of the reference video. We propose a reduced reference technique based on a no-reference method presented in [1], in which the MSE of the received video with packet losses was estimated with five parameters estimated from the received video and the motion vectors, all for each macroblock. We instead compute the parameters at the encoder and transmit a subset as overhead information. The originally proposed five parameters can be reduced to four, and with appropriate parameter subsampling, the MSE can be estimated across multiple packet loss rates, video resolutions, and bit rates. Overhead is a function of video size, frame rate, and subsampling. Estimation accuracy is good at overheads as low as 95 Kbps for video coded in the range of 500 kilobits/second to 2 megabits/second. The technique does not require full decoding of the video and is therefore suitable for low-complexity in-network quality monitoring.