Quality Metrics in Long-Term Preservation and Restoration Paradigms

Increasing term of preservation for audio-visual digitized content as well as digital restoration requires a change in the measure of content quality. As soon as digital content is to be preserved for a long time it will become the only quality reference material. This is especially true because the traditional analog display technology will no longer be in use. As a consequence, monitoring the quality of content, estimating quality gain or loss after a restoration work and evaluating the expected quality for a given (possibly currently unknown) target display requires a new approach to quality evaluation. — Most audio-visual quality measurement experiments used to be done by comparing an original version and a present version. However new technical paradigms imply a possible loss of reference to the original content hence the need for reference free quality measure. — It is equally necessary to go beyond the traditional signal processing measures inherited from the video technology. All the technical processes applied to the analog content up to its digitization bring their own degradation and are modifying the quality of the content. — A two stage strategy is proposed. — A first set of metrics is derived from traditional signal and image processing and weighted considering the technical work-flow used to obtain the digital copy. — Then a second metrics is built from the first one taking into account the intended restitution channel. — Such a method is designed to allow a better estimation of quality when comparing two versions of the same preserved content or the gain of quality of a restored content.

Published

2010-10

Content type

Original Research

Keywords

Digital preservation, digital restoration, quality measure, quality estimator, quality assessment, audio-visual quality

DOI

10.5594/M001358

ISBN

978-1-61482-944-7