The arrival of the Internet and modern handheld communication devices is ushering in a remarkable revolution in the consumption of digital video technologies and products, and a resulting sea change in the nature and needs of the global information infrastructure. Digital video acquisition, networking, storage and display devices have advanced to an extraordinary degree of sophistication, leading to the rapid rise of many popular and globally deployed networked applications as Internet Video, Interactive Video on Demand (VoD), Video Telepresence, Video Phones, PDAs and other Wireless Video devices, Video Surveillance, HDTV, Digital Cinema etc. Monitoring and controlling the quality of broadcast video streams is essential towards improving quality of service (QoS). Yet, progress in methods for performing reliable video quality analysis has remained quite limited.
The research proposed here will create powerful Video Quality Assessment (VQA) algorithms that correlate highly with visual perception. The expected benefits of the proposed research are far-reaching. Methods for improving video Quality of Service (QoS) are a major emphasis of the world-wide cable, semiconductor, cell phone, and networking industries and considerable efforts are being expended on this topic. Successful VQA algorithms are likely to be deployed throughout the global wireline and wireless communication networks as well as in video acquisition and display devices. Breakthrough theories of video quality will enable the design of algorithms for video processing based on perceptual criteria - a decades-old holy grail of imaging science.
