Barriers towards no-reference metrics application to compressed video quality analysis: On the example of no-reference metric NIQE

Abstract

This paper analyses the application of no-reference metric NIQE to the task of video-codec comparison. A number of issues in the metric behavior on videos was detected and described. The metric has outlying scores on black and solid-colored frames. The proposed averaging technique for metric quality scores helped to improve the results in some cases. Also, NIQE has low-quality scores for videos with detailed textures and higher scores for videos of lower bit rates due to the blurring of these textures after compression. Although NIQE showed natural results for many tested videos, it is not universal and currently can’t be used for video-codec comparisons.