Instantaneous video quality assessment for lightweight devices

Monitoring and controlling the user’s Quality of Experience (QoE) in modern video services is a challenging proposition, mainly due to the limitations of current video quality assessment algorithms. While subjective QoE methods would better reflect the nature of human perception, these are not suitable in real-time automation cases. On the other hand, the existing objective algorithms are either too complex or too inaccurate, particularly in the context of lightweight devices such as camera sensors or smart phones. This paper introduces a novel objective QoE algorithm, Instantaneous Video Quality Assessment (IVQA), that is comparably as accurate as the most heavyweight algorithm available in the literature but can also be run in real-time. This approach is tested against a selection of ten objective metrics and benchmarked with a subjective user dataset.