Video Compression: The Need for Testing

Video compression continues to permeate the television environment, becoming more commonplace from the studio and edit suite to transmission and broadcast. Consumers will soon be viewing video programs that have undergone multiple concatenations of compression. How will the quality be judged? Is the compression really lossless, or lossy? What is actually happening to the video? The fact is, video compression is here and will continue to expand and affect the production, post-production, distribution, and transmission processes. Now, more than ever, reliable testing methods are needed to quantify the performance of video compression. Objective measurements for digital video compression are still evolving and are not yet standardized. Existing measurements utilize complex digital image processing techniques to analyze differences between source and processed video. This paper presents some of the issues and concerns of video compression applications in a global television environment and describes an implementation of an automated system to test the quality of digitally compressed video.

Print ISSN

0036-1682

Published

1995-11

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J04690