Improving preservation and access processes of audiovisual media by content-based quality assessment

Abstract

Quality assessment of audiovisual files is an important tool in many steps of the preservation workflow, as well as for use and access of archive material. Today mainly technical properties of the files can be checked, e.g. file integrity or standards compliance of file wrappers and encoded streams. Checking the audiovisual quality manually results in extremely high labor costs. In this work we present a semi-automatic quality assessment approach that combines the efficiency of fully automatic detection with the interpretation capability of humans to provide verified high quality assessment results. We also address the issue of interoperable metadata for quality assurance, discussing the state of the art and the gaps, and propose a framework for describing visual quality analysis results, which fills one of these gaps. © Springer-Verlag 2013.