Measuring Video Quality

I hope that you enjoyed the first entry in Perceptual Matters and I encourage you to post questions related to any perceptual area of research since my intention is to cover everything from video to tactile thermals at some point.

For this edition of When Humans Collide with Technology, I would like to focus on Intel® DHCAT.

One of the most challenging problem spaces we face today is conveying what is good media experience. In my last post I mentioned a few basic questions that consumers are faced with. To better understand this, it’s useful to break the media experience into a few manageable chunks.

The first and most basic chunk is video encoding technologies. The broadcast industry uses a standard format of video encoding that was defined for viewing content on your television at home. It was named after the group that developed it, the Motion Pictures Experts Group, or MPEG. With the introduction of digital technologies came a flood of new codecs, which made video more pervasive since it was easier to distribute. In order to understand the origins of video quality measurement, we’ll initially ignore the introduction of computers and digital signal processing and all of the advances made in the digital revolution. First, let’s consider the analogue television environment where processing was limited to editing machines with no digital components.