Video Quality Metric for Temporal Fluctuation Measurement

Temporal fluctuation artifact is often observed in digitally compressed video. However, the fluctuation intensity cannot be correctly measured by the traditional image/video quality metric, e.g., the peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), which only addresses on the quality of a single image. Although there are several metrics proposed for temporal fluctuation measurement, e.g., the sum of squared differences (SSD) and motion compensated SSD (MCSSD), these first difference based algorithms may falsely treat a smoothly continuous change of pixels as the temporal fluctuation artifact. To overcome this problem, this contribution proposes a second difference based temporal metric, named the motion estimated mean scaled absolute second difference (MEMSASD). The performance of the MEMSASD is examined using a number of video sequences with varying degrees of temporal fluctuation, which are generated by an H.264/AVC compliant codec. Compared with existing metrics such as the PSNR, the SSD and the MCSSD, the results of the proposed metric better reflect the temporal fluctuation intensity.