image quality of compressed video

[chacademus]

Does anyone know if there is a way of measuring the qulity of compressed video? I ask as it is part of my academic studies. Is there a tool which tries to measure this or is it not possible? Thanks in advance.

[kinneera]

Heh, unfortunately I don't think there is any magic tool that will spit out some kind of number that gives a relative quality, a la the meaning of life being '42'.

[dphirschler]

You would most likely have to code your own program that loaded image-1 and compared it pixel by pixel to image-2. Then you would have a numeric quantity of how many missed pixels.

Then you could add an extra routine that compared the missed pixel to the correct pixel and determine just how far off the miss was. It wouldn't be that difficult after you wrote the routines to actually load the file formats.

This might help you, there was a link I discovered with some C routines that loaded images of varying formats. Here is the link...

http://pcvideo.tripod.com/download.htm

Good luck!


Darryl