Objective assessment of surveillance video quality

Abstract

This paper presents an objective video quality index capable of subjectively relevant video quality and signal fidelity assessment. Surveillance and security video is often transmitted through constrained channels leading to serious, mainly compression borne degradations of received signals. The value of such streams to an observer tasked with viewing them is directly determined by their fidelity and perceived quality. Our video quality index evaluates preservation of localised gradient and colour information from the original reference video in the transmitted, degraded version as a basis of an overall fidelity score. Applying a biologically inspired information loss model yields a perceptually relevant quality score for each degraded sequence. Our approach is shown to be able to highlight areas where true scene information is lost and compression artifacts appear as well as provide quality scores with a very high level of agreement with subjective assessments obtained through time consuming psychometric trials on a wide range of surveillance video quality.