Opticom PEVQ User Manual
OPTICOM GmbH
Naegelsbachstrasse 38
91052 Erlangen
GERMANY
Phone: +49 9131 / 53 020 0
Fax: +49 9131 / 53 020 20
EMail: info@opticom.de
Website: www.opticom.de
Further information:
www.pevq.org
www.peaq.org
www.pesq.org
www.3sqm.org
www.psqm.org
PEVQ™
ADVANCED PERCEPTUAL
EVALUATION OF
VIDEO QUALITY
White Paper by OPTICOM GmbH, Germany
PEVQ™, 3SQM™ and the OPTICOM logo are registered trademarks of OPTICOM GmbH; OPERA, the ‘single-sided speech quality measure’ and ‘the perceptual
quality experts’ are trademarks of OPTICOM GmbH. All other product names are trademarks of their respective holders.
© OPTICOM GmbH, Erlangen, GERMANY, 2005 - www.opticom.de
EVALUATION OF VIDEO QUALITY
ADVANCED PERCEPTUAL
CONTENTS
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY.................................................................................................................................3
2 INTERNATIONAL STANDARDIZATION .........................................................................................................3
3 THE NEED FOR QUALITY TESTING................................................................................................................ 4
4 SUBJECTIVE TESTING...................................................................................................................................6
5 INTRUSIVE TESTING .....................................................................................................................................7
6 PERCEPTUAL EVALUATION OF VIDEO QUALITY ...........................................................................................8
6.1 STRUCTURE OF THE PEVQ ALGORITHM ............................................................................................................. 8
6.2 SUPPORTED FILE FORMATS.............................................................................................................................. 9
6.3 FEATURES AND LIMITATIONS OF PEVQ ............................................................................................................. 9
6.4 PERFORMANCE OF PEVQ .............................................................................................................................. 10
6.5 KPIS OBTAINED FROM PEVQ ........................................................................................................................ 10
6.5.1 PEVQ Score....................................................................................................................................... 10
6.5.2 Delay................................................................................................................................................. 10
6.5.3 Brightness......................................................................................................................................... 10
6.5.4 Contrast ............................................................................................................................................ 10
6.5.5 PSNR................................................................................................................................................. 10
6.5.6 Distortion Indicators......................................................................................................................... 10
7 PRODUCT AVAILABILITY ............................................................................................................................. 11
7.1 STAND-ALONE OPERA PRODUCTS ................................................................................................................ 11
7.2 OEM LIBRARIES .......................................................................................................................................... 11
7.3 INTEGRATED NETWORK MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS ........................................................................................... 11
8 ABOUT OPTICOM ........................................................................................................................................12
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EVALUATION OF VIDEO QUALITY
ADVANCED PERCEPTUAL
1 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
As with the new standards for global communications, like 3G/UMTS and WiMAX, new broadband mobile
networks are becoming available, new services are added to the service provider’s portfolio. Beside simple
broadband data transmission services the providers offer more and more video and multimedia based services like
…
Video Telephony
Video Streaming, and
Video Messaging.
The quality of those services is crucial for the acceptance of the new offerings by the users, since nobody would
pay for a service, too poor to be used. Hence, the demand for new quality measurement techniques is at hands.
OPTICOM has become well known in the industry over the last ten years of its existence, because of our
achievements in successfully establishing state-of-the-art standards in the audio quality domain like PESQ (ITU-T
P.862), PEAQ (ITU-R BS.1387) and 3SQM (ITU-T P.563). OPTICOM now presents a new advanced measure for video
quality. The Perceptual Evaluation of Video Quality (PEVQ) is like all the other measurements from OPTICOM based
on the user’s perception.
With OPTICOM’s PEVQ OEM solution service providers are now in the position to monitor their video services as
well as network equipment manufacturers and codec developers can test their hard- and software. T&M vendors
get a new measurement technique at their hands to expand their portfolio by a reliable and effective video quality
testing solution.
PEVQ was developed by OPTICOM in cooperation with the Institute for Mobile Communications at the University
of Erlangen-Nuernberg, and comprises earlier work of KPN Research, the Netherlands.
PEVQ is available, now! And OPTICOM is more than happy to answer your questions.
2 INTERNATIONAL
STANDARDIZATION
In the video domain, international standardization work is currently performed by the Video Quality Experts Group
(VQEG), while the ITU-T is observing the progress. OPTICOM is actively participating in the VQEG work, while
PEVQ is one of the promising models proposed for standardization. Results from standardization work are however
not expected before the course of 2006. Of course, OPTICOM will take every means to ensure that PEVQ will
continuously be kept up-to-date to incorporate the latest developments of this ongoing standardization work.
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EVALUATION OF VIDEO QUALITY
ADVANCED PERCEPTUAL
3 THE NEED FOR QUALITY
TESTING
The need for testing the perceived quality of video information after transmission and decoding is a key element to
guarantee for the customers’ satisfaction, and thus the success of new video based services. The worst scenario
that could, for example, happen to service providers is that the customers are annoyed by the poor quality-ofservice in such a way that they are not likely to consider this new feature in the future at all. The second worst
effect to be expected would be if customers are going to switch to a competitive operator that provides better
service quality.
This is likely to spoil the revenue expectations for the value added by the video services on a large scale. However,
all this is not unrealistically far-fetched, in particular when we keep in mind that customers expectations are well
aligned from their daily television consume. Of course, mobile video transmission on every user’s terminal
represents an innovative advantage, still comparable to the introduction of mobile phones as such. Nevertheless,
new technologies will not find acceptance if especially video information is not delivered in an acceptable quality.
A bad video connection might severely disturb the speech link, even though the voice quality as such is excellent.
These effects are known as audio-visual interaction and will be taken into account in the future design of
perceptual measurements, too.
Let us take an example. As a matter of fact lossy coding techniques and noisy transmission channels may
irreversibly destroy relevant parts of crucial information. A typical video coding technique using a simple blockmatching algorithm can already tremendously impair a video signal, as depicted in the following sequences below.
Figure 3-1 shows a single frame taken from a typical video stream – in this case, the red Ferrari of Michael
Schumacher leaves the track and rushes into the green. The video content is undistorted and it can be seen that
the Ferrari does not seem to be broken at all. Schumacher is doing ok – a vital information for every formula one
fan watching the scene on his mobile.
Figure 3-1 Schumacher and the Ferrari are ok!
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