The field of perceptual quality assessment has gone through a wide range of developments and it is still growing. In particular, the area of no-reference (NR) image and video quality assessment has progressed rapidly during the last decade. In this article, we present a classification and review of latest published research work in the area of NR image and video quality assessment. The NR methods of visual quality assessment considered for review are structured into categories and subcategories based on the types of methodologies used for the underlying processing employed for quality estimation. Overall, the classification has been done into three categories, namely, pixel-based methods, bitstream-based methods, and hybrid methods of the aforementioned two categories. We believe that the review presented in this article will be helpful for practitioners as well as for researchers to keep abreast of the recent developments in the area of NR image and video quality assessment. This article can be used for various purposes such as gaining a structured overview of the field and to carry out performance comparisons for the state-of-the-art methods.
Keywords:No-reference; Image quality assessment; Video quality assessment; Perceptual quality 1 Review
IntroductionThere has been a tremendous progress recently in the usage of digital images and videos for an increasing number of applications. Multimedia services that have gained wide interest include digital television broadcasts, video streaming applications, and real-time audio and video services over the Internet. The global mobile data traffic grew by 81% in 2013, and during 2014, the number of mobileconnected devices will exceed the number of people on earth, according to predictions made by Cisco. The video portion of the mobile data traffic was 53% in 2013 and is expected to exceed 67% by 2018 [1]. With this huge increase in the exposure of image and video to the human eye, the interest in delivering quality of experience (QoE) may increase naturally. The quality of visual media can get degraded during capturing, compression, transmission, reproduction, and displaying due to the distortions that might occur at any of these stages. The legitimate judges of visual quality are humans as end users, the opinions of whom can be obtained by subjective experiments. Subjective experiments involve a panel of participants which are usually non-experts, also referred to as test subjects, to assess the perceptual quality of given test material such as a sequence of images or videos. Subjective experiments are typically conducted in a controlled laboratory environment. Careful planning and several factors including assessment method, selection of test material, viewing conditions, grading scale, and timing of presentation have to be considered prior to a subjective experiment. For example, Recommendation (ITU-R) BT.500 [2] provides detailed guidelines for conducting subjective experiments for the assessment of quality of television pictures. The outcomes of a subjectiv...
