Quality Assessment of Digital Television Signals

Procedures have existed for many years permitting the subjective evaluation of conventional (analog) television pictures. Subjective data has been amassed and objective test signals have been developed that can be used to predict with some certainty the quality of picture that will be presented to the viewer. It is noted that the digital case is substantially more complex than the analog case, but it is important and worthwhile to derive similar procedures for subjectively evaluating digitally encoded television pictures. A way is suggested for beginning such an effort, and it is foreseen that objective test signals could be developed for assuring a given subjectively evaluated quality level in the presence of various digital impairments. In this way, digitized television pictures could be validly compared with each other and with analog pictures. Topics discussed include: the various subjective grading scales; source coding and channel effects; PCM, DPCM and transform encoding; interframe processing; and encoding of composite and component video signals.

Print ISSN

0036-1682

Published

1978-03

Content type

Original Research

DOI

10.5594/J17410