No-reference peak signal to noise ratio estimation based on generalized Gaussian modeling of transform coefficient distributions
Jiwoo Ryu · Optical Engineering · 2012
We present a no-reference peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR) estimation algorithm based on discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficient distributions from H.264/MPEG-4 part 10 advanced video codec (H.264/AVC) bitstreams. To estimate the PSNR of a compressed picture without the original picture on the decoder side, it is important to model the distribution of transform coefficients obtained from quantized coefficients accurately. Whereas several conventional algorithms use the Laplacian or Cauchy distribution to model the DCT coefficient distribution, the proposed algorithm uses a generalized Gaussian distribution. Pearson's χ2 (chi-square) test was applied to show that the generalized Gaussian distribution is more appropriate than the other models for modeling the transform coefficients. The χ2 test was also used to find optimum parameters for the generalized Gaussian model. It was found that the generalized Gaussian model improves the accuracy of the DCT coefficient distribution, thus reducing the mean squared error between the real and the estimated PSNR.