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Detection and measurement of the blocking artifact in decoded video frames

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Abstract

A method for measuring the blocking artifact in video frames is presented, which is capable of detecting this artifact even outside a regular geometric structure, that is, on moving objects in frames encoded with prediction-based techniques. Information-theoretic measures are integrated with models of the human perception, to account for the visibility of the artifact on different image content. A final metric is produced that yields coherent values on variously degraded versions derived from different originals. No information is required on the encoding procedure that originated the artifact; this makes this method suitable to operate on the decoded version of the frames, at the final stage of the video processing chain. Experiments show that the metric has a good correlation with subjective scores and possesses some additional desirable properties.

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Abbreviations

\(r_i^k(j)\) :

First local metric (local steepness increment) of vertical blockiness at row \(i\), on column \(j\), with horizontal distance \(k\) between the differenced pixels

\(dR\varphi _i^k(j)\) :

Second local metric (local border angle) of vertical blockiness at row \(i\), on column \(j\), with horizontal distance \(k\) between the differenced pixels

\(Ir_v(i,j)\), \(IdR\varphi _v(i,j)\) :

Maps of the two vertical metrics of detected blockiness as a function of coordinate pair \((i,j)\)

\(IB_v(i,j)\), \(IB_h(i,j)\) :

Final maps of vertical and horizontal blockiness

\(w_l(i,j)\) :

Luminance masking weight in \((i,j)\)

\(h_{i,j}\) :

Measure of local entropy of the region centered in \((i,j)\)

\(w_t(i,j)\) :

Texture masking weight in \((i,j)\)

\(W_{lt}(i,j)\) :

Map of content masking weights as a function of \((i,j)\)

\(IB(i,j)\) :

Final map of local blockiness (corrected by content weights)

\(B_{\mathrm{av}}\) :

Average strength of the block borders of the image

\(H_{PB}\) :

Metric of blockiness distribution. Average of the local entropy of normalized local blockiness

DBM:

Detected Blockiness Metric. Final proposed metric of the image blockiness

GBIM:

Generalized Blockiness Impairment Metric [26]. First existing metric used for comparison

NPBM:

No Reference Perceptual Blockiness metric [13]. Second existing metric used for comparison

QA:

Quality Assessment

FR:

Full reference

NR:

No Reference

JND:

Just Noticeable Difference

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Correspondence to Giovanni Ramponi.

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Abate, L., Ramponi, G. & Stessen, J. Detection and measurement of the blocking artifact in decoded video frames. SIViP 7, 453–466 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11760-013-0448-z

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