New Method for Spatial Scalable Video Quality Evaluation

Video quality assessment plays an essential role in multimedia systems and services. In the case of scalable video coding, which enables dynamic adaptation based on terminal capabilities and heterogeneous network, variable resolution is one of the most prominent types of video distortions. In this paper, we propose a new spatial distortion metric for evaluating video streaming quality with variable spatial resolution. The key idea is to project video sequence into feature domain and calculate the distortion of content information from the projected principal component matrix and its eigenvectors. This metric can measures the degree of content information degradation especially in spatial resolution scalable video. The performance of the proposed metric is evaluated and compared to some state-of-the-art quality evaluation metrics in the literature. Our results show that the proposed metric achieves good correlations with the subjective evaluations of the EPFL scale video database.