ABSTRACT
This chapter offers a perspective on video quality, its evolution and how it is being measured. Migration from analog signals to digital signals also added another wrinkle into the problem. Classic methods that had been developed to measure video quality rapidly fell to the wayside and new ones were devised to take their place. There are two primary ways to measure video quality. The first is Subjective Quality Assessment. The second is Objective Quality Assessment. Subjective assessment uses human subjects to evaluate, compare or assess the quality of images under test. Experts in the video field have extensive experience in evaluating, producing, distributing or designing systems that deal with video. Non-experts can sometimes see artifacts that an expert might miss since they have no pre-determined way of looking at a video sequence. One of the most advanced video quality test facilities is the Communications Research Centre/Industry Canada in Ottawa, Canada.
