Evaluation of full-reference objective video quality metrics on high efficiency video coding

For the purpose of automatic video quality evaluation, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) has been the most wellknown full reference quality metric since a long time. Improving on PSNR, several other pixel-based quality metrics have been developed, namely Structural SIMilarity (SSIM), Multi Scale-SSIM (MS-SSIM), and Video Quality Metric (VQM). The goal of these objective video quality metrics is to replace time-consuming and expensive subjective quality assessment experiments. These alternative objective metrics have already been evaluated on several video compression schemes, such as MPEG-2 and H.264/AVC, transported over different kinds of network protocols and under a large variation of network characteristics. In January 2013, the successor of the Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC) standard, named High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC), has been finalized. Although HEVC is still a block based hybrid video compression standard, some radical changes are made to subjectively improve the compression efficiency compared to H.264/AVC. Until now, the alternative quality metrics have never been evaluated on this new compression scheme. Therefore, in this paper, we analyze the difference in performance of these full reference metrics. Based on subjective evaluations, a performance analysis is presented which shows the validity of these models when applied to HEVC compressed video content.