Video Quality Evaluation for UMA

This paper1 deals with monitoring user perception of multimedia presentations in a Universal Multimedia Access (UMA) enabled system using objective metrics. To this end, we propose a noreference (NR) video quality metric that measures the block-edge impairment or blockiness in a received video sequence. This NR metric is designed to be used as an integral part of theUMAviewer at the user end. It is based on counting the number of blocks in a given frame that would contribute to the overall perception of blockiness for that frame. It is based on the idea that blockedge impairment is observed in regions with low spatial activity. Our metric increases as compression increases while at the same time remaining close to zero when monitoring an uncompressed original sequence with no blockiness. The metric has low computational complexity and can be used for real-time monitoring of streaming video in a multimedia transmission scenario.