Detection and measurement of the blocking artifact in decoded video frames

A method for measuring the blocking artifact in video frames is presented, which is capable of detecting this artifact even outside a regular geometric structure, that is, on moving objects in frames encoded with prediction- based techniques. Information-theoretic measures are inte- grated with models of the human perception, to account for the visibility of the artifact on different image content. A final metric is produced that yields coherent values on variously degraded versions derived from different originals. No infor- mation is required on the encoding procedure that originated the artifact; this makes this method suitable to operate on the decoded version of the frames, at the final stage of the video processing chain. Experiments show that the metric has a good correlation with subjective scores and possesses some additional desirable properties.